


The Only Way Out

by SallyExactly



Series: Scar Tissue [1]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Adventure, Found Families, Hugs all around, Mission Fic, Multi, Sarcasm, Time Travel, angst in immoderation, romance in moderation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-07-28 00:06:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 334,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16230101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SallyExactly/pseuds/SallyExactly
Summary: Chinatown leaves the team shattered and grieving, but their only option is to stumble forward. To save the world, they'll need strength of character they didn't know they had, to defeat depths of evil like they've never seen. Meanwhile, they need to find a way to decide their own future, not give up hope... and save the fighting for the actual bad guys.It's honestly a toss-up which of those will be hardest.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains: canon-typical and Emma-typical violence; historical and contemporary misogyny, racism, ableism, and homophobia; references to domestic and child abuse; references to suicide; the general level of creepiness you'd expect from a show about a cult.
> 
> These warnings subject to change. See each chapter for more detailed warnings.

He watched Denise Christopher move around the bunker.

He knew a lot about her. Probably more than she would like, considering that store of information included a good deal about her children. That was the kind of information he filed away in the deepest recesses of his mind and prayed to the God in whom he wasn't sure he believed any longer that it was never relevant.

Considering the amount she knew about _him_ , everything else was fair game.

He continued to watch her after she settled down, looking up from his book at intervals. She had to have noticed, but she waited a good half an hour before looking up and saying, "Are we going to have a problem, Flynn?"

No bluster. Just a hint of irritation.

Garcia studied her. "You have children," he began finally. Would she flinch? She did not. "You know exactly the value of what you took from me."

She looked at him. "Two of my team, you _shot_ ," she said after a minute. "Or had shot. The third, you threatened to the point that her roommate says she has screaming nightmares."

Garcia had not known that, but he was not going to process that information or evaluate its veracity right at this moment. Definitely not.

"It seemed like every single time my team forged any tentative agreement with you, you threw it back in their faces and betrayed them at the first chance," she added. "So. What exactly should I have done?"

Garcia continued to study her, which was the whole point of this exercise. Agent Christopher had been given a mission and a target. She had changed the former and spared the latter, sending an alleged terrorist to prison instead of execution, taking down several of her fellow agents, exposing Rittenhouse, subsequently hiding the team who had helped her accomplish all this, and finally, breaking said alleged terrorist out of prison and arranging for the blame to fall on enemies of her country. Among whom she had initially been told, he was one.

Garcia had met people like her before. They never considered themselves fanatics. But their highest devotion was never to people, it was to a _cause_. An ideal. Something you couldn't even touch.

She was career law enforcement, and had worked her way up through the ranks since the late seventies? early eighties? as a racial minority and a woman who loved other women, in a field notoriously hostile to all three categories.

She had also managed to take _him_ down.

And Lucy trusted her– though Lucy's trust was sometimes misplaced. She hadn't even thought to check for a tail before coming to their meeting.

Now Christopher was Garcia's... what? Nemesis? Boss? She was ultimately the one who'd stopped him from saving Lorena and Iris, and yet, he thought she was the latter more than the former.

He realized the silence had dragged out when she said, "I am sorry your family is still–"

"Don't."

"But so is Lucy's," she continued.

Garcia had known this as well– guessed it, rather, in the newly honed sharp edges of Lucy Preston. "Her sister's still gone?"

"And is likely to remain so. Amy Preston was apparently erased fairly thoroughly from history. By _your_ former pilot."

Thinking of Emma would never not cause him shame. "How much does Lucy know?"

"She was the one who told me." Agent Christopher was now watching him as openly as he was watching her, despite the fact that his very presence there indicated what conclusions she'd already formed about him. She apparently thought him trustworthy enough to spare him from a _de facto_ death sentence, but she would certainly question his motivation, question just how far he could be trusted.

The real reason he was there: by working at cross-purposes, they had collectively delivered a time machine into Rittenhouse's hands. He had tried and tried _and tried_ to get this team onto his side. And failed. Now that they weren't working for Rittenhouse any more... it didn't so much matter who joined whom.

"My superiors authorized a mission to bring Amy Preston back, in fact," she added.

Despite himself, Garcia asked, "What happened?"

"Rittenhouse– her mother– grabbed her first."

After a moment, Garcia asked, with a faint sneer, "And you're trying to make sure I know how much I _owe_ Lucy?"

Christopher refused to be baited. "I think you know that already."

 _So you're making sure I know_ you _know how much I owe Lucy_. Responding to a perceived threat with another implicit threat.

He had thought, from all he knew of Christopher, that she was a remarkably cool-nerved, steady, thoughtful person. But he'd _seen_ little of her, and files could always be deceiving, especially if the subject in question had the sense to surround themself with good people. You could never get to know someone as thoroughly on paper as in person.

Reading Lucy's journal... had been a gargantuan version of that particular problem.

Now, he found that Agent Christopher's file had not deceived him, except that it might have made him even underestimate her. If a time came when they were once again enemies, now he'd know better; for the moment, Garcia was qualifiedly reassured as to the– nominal– head of this operation.

Which meant there was no need to draw out this conversation.

He looked down at his book. "Don't worry," he drawled, full of false brightness. "I'll be good."

"Why would that possibly worry me?" Agent Christopher murmured, and despite himself, Garcia almost smiled.

#

Garcia walked into the common area of the bunker, expecting to find Lucy on the couch, to tell her that if she wished she could have his bed and he'd take the cot in the storage room, the one they'd set up for young JFK. He assumed she'd rejected that room herself because of its lack of windows and small confines, but he wasn't claustrophobic. Besides, a cot would still be more comfortable than the floor padded by two blankets, which was where he'd slept for a few hours last night.

But Lucy wasn't there. The only person in the large space was Rufus, working on the Lifeboat. Unexpected, but fine. No need for them to talk. Garcia glanced at him again, then moved through into the kitchen. He could eat while he waited for Lucy.

Absolutely none of the food here appealed, but it was fuel. He dumped the least repulsive option– and that was saying something, considering his limited options during many a campaign over the last twenty-five, thirty years– in a dish and sat watching the repair process. No need for them to talk, but no reason for him not to pick up all he could about the Lifeboat. Knowledge was always power.

Besides, Rufus had presented a puzzle that day, which Garcia hadn't solved to his satisfaction, and now he had the time. Rufus was also the one of his original three opponents Garcia knew least, by virtue of his not being as brash and obnoxious as Wyatt, and, obviously, not being Lucy.

Garcia did, at least, sit where Rufus could see him. He could be kind. When it suited/amused him.

Rufus gave him one long look, then went back to his tinkering with little visible sign of alarm.

"Patched up?" Garcia found himself asking about five minutes later.

Rufus glanced at him. "Yeah." Pause. "Thanks for... earlier."

Garcia looked at him, nonplussed. It wasn't supposed to work like that. He didn't want _thanks_. If he wanted anything, he wanted Rufus to be less of an idiot.

 _Now both my enemies have guns_ , Rufus had said.

"I'm sorry that in Chicago, I couldn't find another way," he said abruptly.

Rufus stopped, turned, and looked at him.

Garcia didn't expect Rufus to believe him. He didn't particularly want or need, let alone expect, the other man's _forgiveness_. But if Garcia could convince Rufus that he in fact harbored no more designs on his life...

Well, that much, perhaps, he owed him.

"It's a... meaningless apology, which is why I haven't... offered it. But you deserve it nonetheless." Garcia looked down, then back up.

Rufus looked like he was trying to parse the insult Garcia realized too late was hidden in there. Damn it, that had been completely unintentional. "I thought..." he added. "It was a choice between sparing your team and saving the world. I thought I _had_ no choice."

He had this familiar feeling that perhaps he should stop talking now, so he did.

"Technically, we'd been sent to kill you," Rufus said slowly.

 _Technically_ was being a little delicate, wasn't it? But no, this wasn't how it was supposed to work. Rufus wasn't supposed to try to be _understanding_ or _conciliatory_. He was supposed to call Garcia a fucking bastard so they could sit in stony silence while Garcia waited for Lucy.

... perhaps he hadn't yet perfected the knack of relations with his teammates.

"It was my, uh, option of last resort, if that... makes you feel any better," Garcia trailed off rather lamely.

Rufus looked at him like something he'd found on the bottom of his shoe. "Not really, no."

Ah, well. Garcia settled in to enjoy the awkward silence again.

"And let's be honest," Rufus said after a few more minutes.

 _Oh, yes_ , let's.

"We both know that, Lucy being Lucy, she would actually take it better if you shot her than me or Wyatt."

 _I would never._ The strength of his reflexive horror startled him.

He hoped he would never have to.

"So if she thinks there's a reason to have you around..." He trailed off, letting Garcia come to his own conclusions. And then, back to silence.

These 'repairs' did not actually look particularly necessary. Garcia could tell only by the frequency with which Rufus shifted rather aimlessly between different systems and parts. Interesting.

"Lucy stands up for you, you know," Rufus added, after perhaps five minutes.

_What?_

"What?"

"Lucy."

"I got that part."

"Takes your side when you're not around."

Garcia raised his eyebrows, allowing the other man to interpret it as either scorn or an invitation to continue, as he chose. He'd hoped, perhaps– but–

What was this warm feeling? And what was he going to do with it?

"Wyatt said that, after the SWAT team grabbed you, she tried to convince Agent Christopher to let you save your family. She didn't... she _really_ didn't know about that team."

Garcia felt the reflexive stab of pain, at the words _save your family_ , as he always did. "Didn't make any difference." He'd still ended up in a jail cell instead of– No, it made no difference to him. Knowing that Lucy had argued on his behalf.

Definitely not. No.

"You know, she gave up a chance to save her sister because of you?" Rufus added.

 _Yes, I know_ – except, what? Agent Christopher had referenced a mission thwarted by Rittenhouse's abduction of Lucy, _after_ he'd been captured, so this couldn't be the same one.

"When?" he asked crisply.

"When we stole the Lifeboat, we were going to go back and..." Rufus paused. "Then you jumped, and we followed you instead. To Chicago."

 _When we stole the Lifeboat_. Someday, perhaps, he'd get that full story. He doubted, for obvious reasons, that it was the same as in Lucy's journal.

"Why are you telling me this?" he demanded.

Another shrug. "I just thought you should know."

Whatever Rufus intended him to do with this information, Garcia did not intend to do it while he was around. He finished his unappealing meal, washed, dried, and put away his dish. He didn't know where Lucy could possibly be sleeping– was Rufus avoiding his girlfriend? Had the three of them reverted to their original sleeping arrangements– but it didn't appear to be out here.

But he stopped, instead of continuing back to his room.

"Anthony stood up for _you_ ," he said.

Rufus looked at him.

"I knew that if you were... injured or killed, the team would be useless. He refused to have any part in that."

Rufus straightened up. Unconsciously, Garcia thought. He took a step forward and tilted his chin up. "How did Anthony die?"

Garcia looked at him. It wasn't that Rufus wasn't afraid. Garcia could tell that he was. Yet here he was, with a man who could easily kill him, who had already shown a willingness to do it. A violent killer much larger than he. Asking about one of Garcia's most painful murders, not because the answer would benefit him in any way whatsoever... but because he thought asking was the right thing to do.

Garcia had known, of course he'd known, who his campaign against Rittenhouse was turning him into. He'd known something about what the fight would do to Lucy. But he hadn't considered much else about what it was doing to the rest of the naïve trio fighting so hard against him.

Rufus would have had the hardest time out of the three, wouldn't he? Garcia remembered leaving him at the edge of the Rittenhouse plantation, only for him to save all their lives when Garcia's own plan had gone terribly wrong. He remembered Frank Hamer, who'd automatically assumed Garcia was trying to pin a crime on a black man.

He remembered earlier, how Wyatt, Rufus's soldier friend, had told him to stay behind where it was safe... safer. How Rufus had waded into the fray to protect suffragettes anyway, based on nothing more than a bizarre, aggravating conviction of his own invincibility, and the belief that it was the right thing to do.

He reminded Garcia of another young idiot, an idealist who'd run away at the age of 15 to fight for freedom. The resemblance unsettled him.

"I found him sabotaging the Mothership," Garcia said crisply. "He said he'd blow the charges if I came any closer."

Garcia had not wanted to kill him. He'd tried desperately to get him to just put down the damn gun and step away from the detonator. But Anthony had been, as Garcia had seen almost at once, determined not to listen. He'd decided that he couldn't go on as he had been... and blowing up the Mothership wasn't the only way out.

"He... died almost instantly, if that, uh, matters to you." Had Rufus been fighting long enough to understand how much worse it could get?

Garcia was startled to find himself hoping not.

Rufus shook his head slowly.

"I bet you're going to tell me that you thought it was a choice between sparing him and saving the world, too," Rufus said after a minute. "That you thought you had no choice."

Garcia didn't see any point in responding to that.

Rufus shook his head again. "God, you make such awful choices."

Garcia barely swallowed his startled, bitter laugh. It came out as kind of a choking noise.

"Kill Anthony and you end up completely dependent on a Rittenhouse _mole_ as a pilot," Rufus added.

Garcia had had plenty of time to think about that in prison. _Plenty_ of time.

"And I bet you're gonna tell me," Rufus added, turning back to his work. That took guts, Garcia had to admit. "I bet you're gonna tell me that you'd do it all differently if you had the chance over again."

"Knowing what I know now?" Garcia... considered that. Considered the merits of lying versus telling the truth, and finally settled on saying nothing. Whatever value he placed on his rapport with the team– and he hadn't completely decided what that was yet, but he was having this conversation– _perhaps Capone could have infected you with diphtheria instead_ probably would not achieve anything positive.

"Why are _you_ telling _me_ this?" Rufus added.

Garcia had a very pragmatic and convincing answer on the tip of his tongue: "So on our next mission you can spend more energy fighting Rittenhouse and less watching me over your shoulder."

"Yeah, like _that's_ going to happen." Rufus put down whatever electronic tool he was holding. "I'm going to bed. Don't touch the Lifeboat."

"No joyrides," Garcia promised him.

Rufus shook his head in– what? Disgust?– and headed towards the bedrooms.

#

Jiya made her way through the silent bunker.

The hours since Future Lucy and Future Wyatt had left in the second Lifeboat had been filled with frantic packing— they'd been afraid that Rittenhouse would come for them, thanks to Jessica, before they could get out. The others had finally disappeared to collapse in exhaustion. Denise had told Jiya to get some sleep, too, because she'd have to jump the Lifeboat to their new base, today.

Jiya had tried. This was the result. She knew she wouldn't sleep any more.

She was a lot better at sneaking, now, than she had been the last time she'd seen this place. Three years ago.

And with Rufus.

It was like she stood on a beach, battered by waves of memory and grief crashing over, and over, and over. She saw no end in sight– and the thought she might one day _not_ remember like this... was worse than all the rest.

At this hour, the light in the kitchen startled her. Flynn sat there, his eyes a little glazed with pain or painkillers or both, eating a bowl of... instant pasta? rather clumsily with his left hand. Somehow, she would've expected him to be more ambidextrous.

She'd wanted to avoid everyone, because she was still angry. Because soon they'd all be up anyway, and they were– _too much_ for her right now. Solicitous of her, even in their own pain, to the point that she felt she had to keep her grief under control. She'd learned to be selfish, in Chinatown, so she wasn't thinking only of adding to their burden. But she just _could not_ handle their concern right now.

But Flynn was probably fine, because he wasn't going to care about her feelings. They glanced at each other, and came to the mutual agreeable conclusion that they didn't need to talk.

Then Jiya's brain caught up with her. The empty couch– "Where's Lucy?"

She wasn't in the bathroom, and that whole _being kidnapped_ thing had made Jiya wary of people disappearing in the bunker–

"Sleeping."

"Oh." She relaxed. And then considered how certain he sounded. "Did you have something to do with that?"

Flynn gave her a Look. On the Flynn scale from zero to murder, it was only about a three, and she wasn't the woman she'd been the last time she stood here. She still found herself raising her hands, placating. "Hey, she doesn't sleep enough, so if you managed to convince her, uh, good."

Lucy hadn't slept enough before– before, anyway. Jiya would bet anything she'd sleep even less now. Lucy hadn't lost her boyfriend like Jiya had, but she'd still lost a _friend_ in Rufus. Plus, her mother. And yeah, Carol Preston had been Rittenhouse and a horrifying psycho, but... come on. Even someone less Lucy than Lucy would struggle with that one.

 _Rufus_. The pain came rushing back. She stood in front of the sink, glass in hand, and breathed, squeezing her eyes shut to keep the tears in. She did not give one single damn what the sole witness thought right now.

Then she opened her eyes, filled the glass, and drained it. Bodily needs. Drink first, then eat. Maybe the dehydration headache would go away. And the lightheadedness. Simple things. She didn't do her best work when she didn't take care of herself.

And getting Rufus back would take her best work.

The equations the time travelers had brought, that were supposedly the key to getting him back...

It would almost be kinder to know Rufus was lost forever.

A feeling like vertigo edged with glass shards hit her. Rufus was dead, and she was mourning him. But also thinking, every spare moment, of how to save him. _If_ she could save him, if the promise of those equations was anything more than a fool's hope. And _if_ she could get them working. In moments when she thought she might succeed, that hope held the full force of her grief at bay, like the thread suspending the sword of Damocles. And then the hugeness and _impossibility_ of the task struck her, and the thread snapped.

She had to do something with this feeling. She chose to channel it into anger. "Why didn't you stop them?" she demanded.

Flynn looked up, startled and disbelieving.

" _You_ of all people wouldn't care if I were stuck in the 19th century. So why'd you let them take that damned trip?"

" _Stop_ them?" he repeated after a minute. "You don't know them as well as you thought if you thought there was gonna be any stopping them."

"If they'd only _listened_ –"

"People will do a lot to get back someone they love."

She stared at him. The undercurrent to his voice warned her they were getting into territory she might not want to enter. But how much did she care, versus how much did she want a fight, over these four very smart people all ignoring her warning and barreling in to rescue her when she _didn't need rescuing_? Only to get Rufus killed?

" _I warned you_ all–"

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh, like you'd've done anything different?"

She straightened up as his words hit her like a blow. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Damn him, this killer with observations unwelcome in their accuracy.

Damn him, he was right. She turned pointedly away to get some food.

"Besides," Flynn added, with the distinct tone of someone trying to lighten the subject. She must be in bad shape indeed if a man like _Flynn_ felt the need to try to deflect her emotions. "We had to go back for the Lifeboat."

"I told you where to find the Lifeboat," she gritted out.

And did them finding it there mean one version of herself had lived an _entire lifetime_ and died in the late 19th, early 20th century, before the Time Team had come back for her? A version of her now destroyed, or– in an inaccessible alternate universe, or–

"You told us where to find it in the present, but Rittenhouse had already jumped back. They blow it up in your time, we never find it in the present."

She turned and looked at him. That had never occurred to her, and she wasn't sure if talking about it would make it make _more_ or _less_ sense. Did she want to get into a discussion of time loops with a man on strong pain drugs?

"Rittenhouse jumps, we... follow," he said. "That's how it goes."

She made a dismissive noise, but didn't push it farther: she wasn't sure she'd win. "Whatever."

They ate in silence, finishing about the same moment, because Flynn's awkwardness with his left hand slowed him down. But he never looked frustrated, just resigned.

When she stacked his empty bowl on top of hers, he looked as startled as she'd ever seen him in a non-crisis. "You have one good hand," she pointed out. She carried the dishes to the sink and made quick work of washing them. "Besides... I'm enjoying running water. I never thought I'd see that again."

_I'm not gonna let you die just so I can have modern plumbing._

Grief hit her like a blow.

She stifled a gasp, and found herself with her hands braced against the sink. "I don't," she managed, to herself, not him. "I can't– if he's gone– but–"

"You don't know how to mourn him when there's a chance you could have him back."

Jiya froze, turned, and looked at him. He looked steadily back.

Was _this_ what he'd experienced for the last three years?

Her respect for him rose. As did her uneasiness, her fear. If this pressure was what he carried around inside him all the time–

She felt exposed, and fumbled for words to end that moment of vulnerability. "I'm not going to do it by going on a multi-century killing spree."

"It's a low bar, but you cleared it."

She snorted, then instantly resented him for that. Then... no, maybe it was okay.

Flynn gave her an awkward nod of thanks as she put the bowls away. He got up and walked away. Then he stopped. "You should... decide what you're willing to lose, to have him back."

 _To have him back_. It would be easier, in some ways, if Future Wyatt and Future Lucy had never appeared. She was still so _angry_ with Rufus, for ignoring her and coming after her. She had tried to save him once already. He hadn't listened, and now it was on her to save him again, this time by pulling off the impossible. She wanted to shout at him for putting her in this situation.

But if she really wanted to do that, first she had to get him back.

"Decide what I'm willing to lose?" she said. "Like you?"

He turned to look at her steadily. "Probably not like me. No."

She swallowed. "I'm _going_ to get him back." It came out unsteady— not with tears, but with the sheer force of her determination.

He watched her another moment, and nodded once. He took two more steps, then stopped again. "And– save the energy of your guilt for your enemies."

"I don't feel–" She stopped, and choked on the lie.

He turned back to give her a patently disbelieving expression. "You'll need it."

It felt bizarre to be taking emotional advice from Garcia Flynn. What was this, initiation rites into the _Rittenhouse killed my partner_ club? If he was a typical example of the membership, she'd rather pass.

But he knew... he knew about this.

"Um. Thank you. I... think."

He gave no sign of having heard her.

#

Wyatt just needed a little something to help him sleep. That was all.

They'd moved that day to a new base, a rundown little house on a low hill in the north Florida sticks. Totally off the grid, out in the middle of nowhere— and it had a cave under the house and barn, where they could stash the Lifeboat in an emergency.

But it was pretty damn muggy, Florida in the middle of summer, and it was even worse here right under the roof. Downstairs, Jiya and Lucy were taking one small bedroom and Flynn was taking the other, so he didn't have to lug stuff up and down the steep stairs one-handed. Or whatever. That left Connor and Wyatt to take the two closet-like spaces upstairs, where a clumsy plywood partition divided what was basically an attic. Wyatt didn't really mind. More privacy up here, anyway.

He got up and ducked into the tiny half bath under the eaves, where he had to be careful not to hit his head. He soaked his whole head and face under the tap. Maybe that would help.

But only a damn idiot would think it was just the _heat_ keeping him awake.

He hadn't slept last night either. Had any of them? Today had been unloading at the new base, he and Connor doing the brunt of it because Flynn was basically useless. Then he'd gone out for a long walk around the whole place as soon as he got the chance. Just the usual drill for getting familiar with somewhere new; you couldn't defend territory you didn't know. It was acres of scrub in every direction, with a little creek down by the road. Nothing too exciting, but he'd lived in much worse places, and it was a damned sight better than the Bunker in terms of daylight.

And in terms of memories.

Those memories started to come crowding in, and he just couldn't _take_ that right now. He reached between the bed and the wall, took a long swig from the bottle he found there, and stuffed it back in its hiding place. As the whiskey started to work, he _finally_ felt himself relax a bit.

Oh, God, that flash of disbelief, hurt, _fear_ in Lucy's eyes after he'd— after he'd accidentally hit her. She'd been _afraid_ of _him_. How could she think he would _ever_ — He'd tried to apologize, but she'd run off before he'd gotten the chance.

She _knew_ he loved her. She knew, now. He'd told her. She knew he'd never, ever hurt her. Not on purpose. It was okay.

Huh. Obviously, _that_ wasn't enough booze. He took another drink.

The pity and contempt in Jess's eyes—

No. No way. Even just thinking about her now was betraying Rufus all over again. He'd learned his lesson. That chapter of his life was done. Closed. Gone. Over. It was behind him now and he was _moving on_.

Oh, God, _Rufus_.

The feel of lifeblood running out between your fingers... you never, _ever_ got used to it. And Rufus had been Wyatt's best _friend_.

The glassy-eyed look of shock on Rufus's face. Jiya's horror. Lucy charging off stony-faced, to do God knows what—

Another swig.

He was really getting through the bottle. It was his emergency stash, and he'd barely needed it since moving into the Bunker. But this was just for tonight. Even though he'd be fine to fight if Rittenhouse jumped, he knew better than to keep going like this.

A lesson Dad had never learned.

He'd be better tomorrow. The place would be more familiar, he could talk to Lucy, maybe he could close his eyes without seeing—

Besides, he wasn't much good to anyone if he didn't sleep, was he?

His guilt weighed on him, that terrible sucking feeling that seemed to pull him under. He knew the feeling so well, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. After— after _his_ Jess had died, he'd tried so, so hard to do better. And now...

He'd let his team down so badly. And now they were all he had left. They, and Lucy. Could they ever forgive him?

Grimly, he took another swig. He was _going_ to sleep to night. If he didn't, the visions dancing in his head sure as hell wouldn't be sugar plums.

Ah, _there_. He sank deeper into the mattress as this latest swallow worked its magic. There. Okay. Felt so much better.

 _Tomorrow_ , he thought as he drifted off. _Tomorrow will be better..._


	2. Fresh to Purple

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brief violence; references to abuse; references to canonical violence

The solar panels on their new base didn't have enough juice to run an air conditioner, and the merciless Florida summer was sweltering and brutal. It took Jiya all of eleven hours of sweating to decide that the Batcave would be their main base of Lifeboat operations. A cooler working environment was worth running a whole tangle of extension cords through the trapdoor and down the ladder. It was even worth dealing with the various bugs and the damned _mosquitoes_ that found their way into the limestone cave.

The Batcave also had more... space. In the bunker, it had been sort of possible to avoid tripping over each other. Theoretically. But the house was a linoleum-floored kitchen with a washer, a living room with an ancient TV and a set of rabbit ears, two little bedrooms, and one bathroom on the first floor; on the second, two even smaller bedrooms and a half bath. In such a small space, they were on each other's toes, and she couldn't _stand_ it.

She wasn't furious with them any more. Once Rittenhouse had jumped, there'd been no chance they weren't going to follow. But—

But Lucy was going around with eyes like dark hollows and a thousand-yard stare that honestly gave Jiya chills. Every time she tried to comfort Jiya, it was just... even worse. And Wyatt was a damn powder keg. Their pain was just too _much_ for her, it was all too much. She didn't want that pain tempting her to lose control and— and— she needed to _be alone_. In the Batcave, she could spread out her monitors and papers and other gear, and just have room to _think_.

Once the stunned wonder of new!Lucy and new!Wyatt's visit had worn off, they'd all been faced with how damn hard it would be to get Rufus back. Well, no. She wasn't even sure the others _realized_ what she would have to do. She had an incomplete sheaf of equations, she had the pictures she'd strongarmed the Time Team Lite 2.0 into letting her take, and she had the answers she'd scribbled down to the few questions they'd agreed to answer, in the short time they'd stayed. And that was all. She'd begged them to stay longer, to give her more, but they'd been firm that they couldn't. When the new Lifeboat had disappeared, Jiya had felt almost as furious with them as with her present-day teammates.

So it was all on her. And Rittenhouse— _Emma_ — could jump again any time, while they were down a soldier and dependent on a half-trained pilot. So many _damn_ problems for her to solve.

She just needed to be alone.

A few days after they moved in, she dreamt of Rufus again, and woke to an unfamiliar place that felt like exile. She wouldn't sleep again. The Lifeboat would, at least, be familiar. She put some milk and cereal in a mug and then went the long way, through the barn, into the Batcave, because the ladder from the house was only a few feet from the couch where Lucy was sleeping.

But she, again, wasn't alone. Flynn was sitting at the table, awkwardly cleaning the parts of a disassembled gun— two guns?

Once her feet were safely on the ground, she glared at him, but he didn't look up. He'd seen her coming from the top of the ladder, of course, and already dismissed her as not requiring her attention. Fine. Good. She definitely didn't want to talk to him. She knelt in the skeleton of the simulator she and Connor were rebuilding, and picked up where they'd left off when Connor had strong-armed her into going to bed late last night.

"Do you know how to use one of these?" Flynn asked a while later.

She looked past her feet at him. Point and shoot, right? She'd done it in Chinatown, to save Rufus's life, and a time or two before that when the saloon had gotten particularly wild. "I know enough."

She'd put this damned part in backwards last night. She couldn't afford to be this sloppy. She wrenched it free, grabbed the right tool from her waist belt, and started to fix it.

He nodded once. Five, maybe ten minutes went by. "Wanna know more?"

She looked at him again. "I can't think of much I'd want _less_."

Though what did her wants honestly matter these days?

He watched her, expressionless, then went back to his work.

"But if you're offering," she added.

He looked up.

"Then... yes."

Maybe if she'd been better with a gun, she could have shot Emma and saved Rufus. Maybe she could still save one of her teammates. Maybe she could keep Wyatt and Flynn from having to protect her quite so much. If these skills could help, then she had no excuse for being squeamish.

He pushed out the other chair with his foot. Now? She had work to do. But— the simulator would still be here in a few minutes, and he was already working. Plus, she had a mugful of soggy cereal to finish, and her lightheadedness suggested that she'd better. Hesitant, she crossed the Batcave and sat down beside him, eyeing the now-assembled gun in front of him. The second was still in pieces.

Flynn noticed her unease: it was one thing to grab a gun in the heat of the moment to defend someone, but another entirely to become as— as familiar with them as Flynn or Wyatt. "It's not loaded," he told her. "This is how you tell." He showed her the magazine, and how to eject a bullet from the chamber. "Here's how you load it..."

Her unease did not abate. Before all this, she'd never lived a life that guns had any place in. Now, here she was, staring down at this pistol as if it were just another tool. Listening to a lethal ex-terrorist patiently showing her how to use it.

But the change had already happened. She couldn't undo the three years she'd spent in Chinatown. She was who she was, now. And if who she'd become would let them stop this evil organization hell-bent on taking people's choices, loves, and lives from them...

She scooted her chair in closer.

#

Ruthless hands squeezed her neck. Lucy struggled against that iron grip. "Please," she choked out, staring up at the distorted face above her. "Mom— please—"

"I'm sorry, Lucy." Carol looked so disappointed as Lucy began to see stars. "You left me no choice—"

" _Mom_ —"

Lucy gasped awake.

Where _was_ she?

As the panic of the dream faded, fresh panic set in—

Right. Florida. New base. Couch.

She sat up and ran her hands through her hair. God, where to start with a dream like that. Ignore it? Ignoring it sounded good. She got up, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, got a drink, and lay down again.

She tossed and turned, and turned and tossed. The narrow couch limited her motion, not helping her restlessness, though that was far from the main reason for her insomnia. It sounded awful, but after the last few days, even _that_ dream wouldn't keep her awake for long. But there was plenty else to do that for her.

Something made her picture Rufus's smile, and she teared up. Oh, God. She missed him so much, and who could she talk about him with? Jiya? _Let's forget your pain for the moment and talk about_ my _pain?_ Or Wyatt? _Let me rub your screw-up in your face?_ Flynn would listen, but he hadn't really _known_ Rufus. Connor, who'd clearly loved Rufus even if he hadn't always taken the best care of him? Denise?

Denise wasn't here, and she'd warned then she'd be scarcer than usual these next few months. Much as they desperately needed her moderating influence.

But Rufus— Rufus had had to put up with so much _shit_ on those trips, even more than Lucy, and he'd been so incredibly brave. Why hadn't she ever told him how amazing he was? Because you always assumed you had more time to say it, that was why. Whatever thing you thought was better unspoken right up until you no longer had a chance to say it, and then bitterly regretted.

She rolled over. The couch itself was more comfortable than the one in the bunker. But the bunker's air temperature had been— well, freezing, but she'd had sweaters and blankets. Here it was hot and sticky. About all she could do was strip down, but she was sleeping in a common area, so no thank you.

Denise had probably expected her to bunk in with Jiya. But Lucy couldn't. Jiya— deserved space to grieve, not to have someone in what would have been, quite literally, Rufus's space. She so clearly _needed_ space to grieve. It was heartbreaking to watch her try to hold it together and think she was fooling anyone.

Lucy had slept on the couch before. It would be fine.

It would be fine.

She thought of the last time she'd slept on the couch, when...

 _Wyatt_.

Her mind didn't want her to get any sleep at all, huh?

She wanted... no, that wasn't true. She wanted to _want_ to go to him and let him comfort her. But he'd hurt her so _badly_. Could she ever get past that?

Maybe— maybe she just thought too highly of herself. Maybe she was making it out to be a bigger deal than it was. But he'd been so desperate to protect Jessica that he'd betrayed the team, hidden important things from them, and put them all in danger... and then twelve hours later he'd told Lucy he loved her. Was she _wrong_ to be a little skeptical? You didn't just forget someone that quickly.

She would know, after all.

What she _really_ wanted, she realized, was to believe, to _know_ , she hadn't been wrong about him.

She got up for more water and damped her hair down. Being more comfortable would help. Any time now...

Maybe she just wasn't... going to sleep for a while. The first two nights she'd been too exhausted to care, but now... to sleep she'd have to let herself relax, and if she relaxed she'd think about—

So many things.

So many _losses_.

Insomnia was what coffee was for, right? Except even thinking of a hot beverage was repulsive in this weather.

She fidgeted a while longer. Then she got up and tiptoed towards the hall. Stopped, hesitated. It was the middle of the night but—

But.

Very quietly, she knocked.

No response. Knock again? Then the door shuddered, stuck, and came open. Flynn looked at her, clearly very tired.

"I'm sorry," Lucy said automatically. Whispered. "I can't— I'm having trouble sleeping out there, it's too— exposed." If she'd been on the couch the night Jessica had—

"Can I come in," she said. He was already backing away from the door. For a tired moment she thought he was shutting it in her face, but he beckoned her in.

"Oh. Thanks."

The bed was along the same wall as the door, and the room was not large, so she had to walk past him into the middle of the room for him to close the door. It was a lot cooler in here: still gross, but the open window and a dusty box fan perched on the desk made a bit of a breeze.

He waved to the bed and turned to the soft armchair that had seen better days.

"I'm not taking your _bed_ when you've been _shot,_ " Lucy whispered. "I just wanted—"

"I've been back and forth between the bed and the chair all night." His voice was low and rough. "It hurts to lie down."

"Do you need—"

"I have some. Just take the bed, Lucy." He sank gingerly down in the chair and propped his feet on the desk. That pushed the chair back at a precarious angle, but he knew what he was doing... right?

She sat on the edge of the bed. "Wake me if you want to switch. Okay?"

"Go to sleep, Lucy." He closed his eyes pointedly.

She hesitated, then swung her legs into bed and lay down. "I really wasn't trying to kick you out—"

"I know. Sleep."

She succumbed to temptation and put her head down on the pillow. "Thank you."

"Any time, Lucy."

She blinked at the gentleness that had crept into his tired tone. He couldn't possibly mean that. And if he did, why?

Maybe this was a bad idea. If she tossed and turned in here, she'd disturb him more than she already had, and if she tried to keep still she...

She woke to bright sunlight in her face. She felt the momentary disorientation of deep sleep. Flynn was still sprawled back in the chair, mouth slightly open. Even in sleep, his expression looked pained.

Lucy stayed perfectly still. Even so, she wasn't too surprised when he stirred and groaned softly a few minutes later. She felt the familiar guilt of having inconvenienced someone. He _had_ to have been lying about the bed— she shouldn't have come—

He felt blindly for something on the desk, then opened his eyes and frowned. Next to the bed was a battered dresser, looking about as old as the desk, with a glass of water and an orange prescription bottle on top. Lucy picked up both— the name on the bottle was not his, but the date was very recent— and took two steps into his line of sight.

He reached for them.

"How many?"

"One."

Opening one of those childproof bottles would not be particularly easy with your dominant arm in a sling, though she should give him credit for more coordination than she possessed. She handed him pill and glass.

He drank. "Thank you."

"Thanks for letting me stay."

He nodded.

"Do you, um, need anything? Before I go?"

He hesitated. "If you're feeling particularly charitable," he said carefully, not looking at her. He brushed the tip of his tongue over his top lip. "You could come back later and, ah..."

Chest wound. Unusually hesitant Flynn. She put the pieces together. "You need help dressing?"

"Just my shirt."

Right, she hadn't assumed— had there been something in her tone, to prompt that quick reply? She didn't think so. _Had_ it been quick? Maybe this was all in her head—

He noticed and misinterpreted her hesitation. "I can make do. It's not a problem."

"It's not a problem for me to help."

He rubbed his left hand over his face. It wasn't often that she could look down on him. "I'll find you after I shower. Thank you, Lucy."

"Thank— thank you." She tried for a smile and found it was a little easier than it had been the last few days. Then she slipped out and pulled the stubborn door shut behind her.

#

Rittenhouse didn't jump. It put them all on edge.

"What if they totally replaced the Mothership's CPU?" Jiya asked Connor. They were both flat on their backs under the Lifeboat, checking it for damage. In theory, it shouldn't matter that the Lifeboat had sat for a hundred and some years; a hundred and some years of stress was the same whether you traveled through it quickly or slowly, and the Lifeboat was literally _built_ to go through time.

Except wormholes didn't subject the Lifeboat to heat and humidity and little gnawing things, and Jiya wasn't willing to stake her life on the theory anyway.

"Would they still be linked?" she added. What was Emma planning? Were they sneaking through time undetected? What might they have already changed?

In her peripheral vision, she saw him shake his head. "They couldn't."

"What makes you so sure?"

"They don't have the parts or the skills. We made most of that ourselves, remember?"

"Rufus made most of it himself."

"Exactly. With Anthony. I know for a fact that the schematics aren't detailed enough to replicate exactly what they did, and now they're both..."

"Dead," Jiya supplied. The word settled in her gut like a familiar lead weight.

"Yes," Connor said quietly.

Jiya swung open a panel and flinched back from a shower of dirt. "So you're telling me that if something goes wrong with _our_ CPU, we're out of luck."

"That's about the long and short of it, yes."

Great. Another thing she would have to figure out, then. Without Mason Industries' custom machining shop. So convenient that between Rufus's death and her inescapable anxiety prompted by all the things she had to figure out, she couldn't sleep, because she had too much to do, anyway.

"Flynn!" she called. He'd taken to sitting in the corner, either flipping purposefully through a stack of books, or frowning grimly at a laptop. She hadn't asked what exactly he was doing. On principle, she didn't _want_ more people in the Batcave, but she had to admit it was frankly miserable upstairs. Even the violent thunderstorms that blew through each afternoon barely cooled things down. And at least Flynn stayed strictly out of the way, and didn't complain when she put him to work.

Footsteps. She saw his shoes stop.

"Tell me what the lights look like on panel A2. Left of the pilot's seat, upper side."

His footsteps echoed hollowly up the stairs and into the Lifeboat. He called out a sequence of lights.

She made some adjustments. "Now what?"

He read them off eleven or twelve times before Jiya was satisfied. "Thanks!" she called. "How much did Emma know about the Mothership?"

A pause. Then his shoes reappeared beyond the Lifeboat. "You'll have to be more specific. She could fly it."

"Yeah, Flynn, I _know_ that. I meant how good was she at fixing it? Troubleshooting?"

He was either considering the question, or rolling his eyes. "We didn't have many problems," he said finally. "The Mothership was certainly in better condition than the Lifeboat. She replaced the capacitors after a particularly rough jump, and made a small adjustment to the life support system."

"Jiya, Emma was hiding out in Missouri during most of the period the Mothership was built," Connor pointed out. "If anything, she's more familiar with the Lifeboat."

"That's a comforting thought," Jiya muttered under her breath. Then, louder: "What if she kidnapped someone to do it for her? We should check to see if there's anyone missing—"

"I doubt she could _find_ anyone," Connor said. "I had the best team in the world—"

"—funded by Rittenhouse," Flynn pointed out, not really under _his_ breath.

Connor paused just long enough to make it clear he'd heard. "— and there are probably equally smart people out there somewhere, but they don't have the background knowledge necessary."

"Right. Okay." Jiya allowed herself to be persuaded for the moment. She wriggled out backwards from under the Lifeboat, and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Connor did likewise. "So then why haven't they jumped?"

As Connor got some cold water from the small refrigerator that'd been one of the first furnishings in the Batcave, Jiya heard someone coming down the ladder. She couldn't see the ladder, but Flynn could, and one look at his face told Jiya it was Lucy. The difference between Flynn's reactions to Lucy and Wyatt was... not subtle.

"Maybe we have them on the ropes," Connor said after a minute.

Lucy walked around the Lifeboat just in time to join Flynn and Jiya in staring at him in disbelief. "Um... _how?_ "

"When Wyatt raided Rittenhouse, they escaped in the Mothership, but that carries no more than eight. What we did after 1954 really took it out of them. And in Chinatown..." Connor glanced at Lucy, then just went for it. "Emma killed two of their most senior people. She can't have many agents left."

"Emma doesn't need many people left."

Jiya had never heard that tone of dark resolve out of Lucy's mouth before. Jiya watched Flynn look carefully at Lucy, then away.

"She can raise hell all on her own," Lucy added.

"God knows I'm not disagreeing," Connor said. "But—"

"And whatever sleepers they still have," Flynn pointed out.

"Right. But maybe she's... recovering their strength. Laying low before she strikes again."

A pause. "Somehow, that's not any more comforting than any of the other possibilities," Jiya said. But maybe Connor did have a point: she hadn't seen many soldiers, agents, in the base Jessica had forced her to. And when Connor and Rufus had gotten the Lifeboat functional again in the present, they'd pulled its last known location and located that base. Denise had ordered a raid, but they'd only captured two people there, and killed one more.

"So, maybe this is the time to attack."

They all turned to look at the trapdoor, where Wyatt's legs were just coming through. He descended the ladder with his back to them, which gave them all time to exchange looks. Oh, good. Jiya wasn't the only one who saw the elephant in the room... named "Jessica."

He joined their loose circle. He was closest to Jiya, and while he'd descended the ladder and crossed the room quite steadily, she could smell the alcohol on him. "Kill Emma," he added. "And, uh..."

The elephant made loud, showy circles throughout the room in the subsequent silence.

"... end this," Wyatt finished finally.

Lucy looked from one of them to another. "How?"

Long silence. "Jiya, where's the Mothership now?"

Jiya double-checked the monitor. "Somewhere within 50 miles of Manhattan."

"Great," Wyatt said. "Only the most densely populated part of the country."

Her head snapped up. "If you think you could do better—"

She stopped. Everyone was looking at her.

"I definitely couldn't do better," Wyatt said. "None of us could. It'd be easier if Emma was in, say, Wyoming, but... thanks."

His conciliatory tone just rubbed her little outburst in, but she nodded.

"What if we go back in time and... wipe Emma out?" Connor asked. "Keep her parents from meeting, like Wyatt tried to do with..."

"And by 'we,' you mean 'us'?" Wyatt asked.

"Well, ah..."

"I think any of us could kill Emma's father without staining our souls too much." There was something in Flynn's voice... When everyone looked at him, he added, " _I'll_ do it."

All Jiya caught of what Lucy said was 'father,' but whatever it was, Flynn's head snapped around. He stared down at her, and suddenly, you could cut the tension between them with a knife. Jiya cleared her throat. "Lucy, didn't you say that... Emma went back in time to make sure your sister, um."

"Yes." Lucy's cool-and-collected mask covered her face. "My mother told her to make it so that Amy could never be born."

Jiya watched Flynn's own expression change. And, God, Jiya had plenty to occupy her mind, but she was curious just how Lucy had won that kind of... _regard_ from the man who'd been their most implacable enemy not too long ago. Because, here was the thing. It wasn't romantic. It was just...

A puzzle and a distraction. "It wouldn't surprise me if Emma had done the same kind of thing to make herself invincible."

None of the others looked surprised, either.

"And if there's no Emma, does the time machine project ever get off the ground? What would we come back to?" she added.

"It can be a backup plan," Wyatt said firmly after a minute. "Jiya, is there _any_ way you can narrow that location down more?"

"I've _told_ you—"

"I'm asking you to try again!"

As everyone stared at him, Jiya bit back her retort, only because she did _not_ have the patience to get into it with him right now.

"We _can't_ give her time to regroup," Wyatt added, desperation bleeding into his tone.

" _Maybe_ , _if_ I had access to the kind of high-energy particle data only about three labs in the world produce, _and_ a team of physicists working on it. But frankly, if we couldn't crack it at Mason Industries—"

"Great," Wyatt said. "You work on the location, I'll work up a plan with Agent Christopher to raid them once we find them. Maybe we can finally end this."

Jiya stared at him in angry disbelief. The elephant reared on hind legs on a tiny stool, trumpeted, and balanced a ball on the end of its trunk.

"Right." Wyatt looked around at the four of them, and nodded. "Good." He headed back to the ladder. Lucy watched him go, frowning. Flynn raised his eyebrows, and while he didn't actually _say_ anything, he didn't really have to.

"Are you," Jiya demanded when he was gone, laughing because she was so pissed it was that or throw something, " _kidding_ me?"

"Here's an idea, Jiya," Connor said. "The fifty mile radius is because you don't know how fast the signature decays, right?"

"Yes..."

"But now we have some data on the strength of the signal vs. where the Mothership _actually was_. Maybe we can correlate them, find a way to make that circle smaller."

"They hardly ever _see_ the Mothership," Jiya protested. "And all the missions they did were when it was in Flynn's hands, before Rittenhouse blew up all our data."

"I can tell you exactly where the Mothership landed in 1918," Lucy said. "And the other trips, we might not know exactly where they were, but we knew where their target was. It makes sense that they wouldn't land farther away than they had to."

"See?" Connor said. "It's not the worst idea we've ever had."

"That's not a high bar," Jiya and Lucy muttered in chorus.

"Jiya, why don't you see how far you can get. Uh, Flynn and I will keep running the diagnostics," Connor said.

Flynn made a sardonic face, but didn't audibly protest.

"I'll help," Lucy added.

Jiya and Connor exchanged looks.

"Oh, come on! I can tell you what color the lights are."

Flynn looked like he was trying not to smirk.

"Yes, all right," Connor sighed. "Just don't— _touch_ anything, all right?"

Jiya settled herself at her makeshift console— accumulating more jury-rigged parts and connections by the day, all centered around her laptop— as the other three went back to work. Okay, she had to admit, her neck and back both appreciated a break from lying on the stone floor.

"So, uh," Flynn said. "Why isn't Master Sergeant Jack Daniels down here helping with this, exactly?"

"He's not putting his hands on this ship until he's sober." Connor's voice was quiet, and deadly serious.

"Connor, he wasn't _drunk_ ," Lucy said.

"Maybe not. But he wasn't completely sober either."

Yeah, that was another thing: ever since Chinatown, Wyatt... Well. He wasn't ever, as Lucy said, _drunk_. But he was often _drinking_. A beer at lunch, a beer at night, a shot or two to help him sleep.

Honestly? Jiya had a hard time not feeling contemptuous, and that scared her. Because she didn't want to be that kind of person.

 _Jessica's alive. If he_ wants _her back, he might still get her back without time travel. Me? I have to figure out how to rip open the fabric of spacetime without destroying the whole Goddamned universe, to get_ my _lover back_.

She pushed back a pang of grief. She saved them up, each day, for the privacy of her bed.

"It's not easy to find out someone you love is Rittenhouse." Lucy defended him, because she was Lucy. Well, all right, she also knew what she was talking about. "And Jessica— she's decided for their child as well. If..." She trailed off.

If Jessica really _was_ pregnant.

Of course Jiya knew why this would cut Lucy to the bone. But she also thought Lucy might be projecting, or giving Wyatt too much credit. Jiya tuned the conversation out from there.

"... Jiya. Home Base calling Jiya, come in, please."

Jiya blinked. Over an hour had passed. She looked at Connor. "What?"

"We've finished on that system. Everything checks out green except for the manifold balancers, and we need a part to get those out of the yellow."

"Uh, great. Uh, uh, how about debugging the nav? When I jumped us here there was— I think when Emma shot the motherboard it caused a feedforward that might have screwed up the firmware. You fixed the motherboard, but I think you need to reset—"

"How about a _break_?" Connor suggested.

"I don't have time for that."

"Jiya..." It was the gentle, patient tone she knew so well. "Endless sessions don't help anything or anyone. You need to pace yourself. This is a marathon, not a sprint."

"It's a marathon that we need to run at a sprint," she snapped, embarrassed that he was scolding her like a child.

In the way Lucy and Connor looked at each other, Jiya saw another baby elephant tiptoe into the room. Great.

"Jiya, upstairs, I have something for you," Flynn said.

She turned to him. "... If this is a transparent attempt to get me upstairs to chloroform me into resting, I learned a lot in the last three years about how to fight men bigger than me." Not that she could take down Flynn. But she could probably get in a good shot to his groin.

"Of course not. If I were going to use chloroform, why make you go upstairs first?"

"... so you don't have to drag my body one-handed up the ladder, and so Connor and Lucy don't brain you with a wrench?"

His expression indicated that he wouldn't find either of those insurmountable obstacles.

"Fiiiiiiine." She followed him, curious despite herself. He stopped at his bedroom for a canvas bag; she stopped at hers for a pair of shoes. She'd learned, already, not to wander barefoot through this hellscape. Cacti, fire ants, and _rattlesnakes_ , and that had just been the first day.

She really missed the Bay Area.

Flynn led her to a clearing a few minutes from the house. He handed her a set of orange earmuff things, and a pair of goggles. Someone had taped a paper target to a dead tree nearby.

"Won't the gunshots be suspicious?"

"Not in this part of the country." He took out a pistol. "Always assume it's loaded," he told her.

"I know. You told me that."

"You're untrained, I'm telling you again." He handed it to her and slid his goggles down over his eyes. "Show me that it's empty, then show me how to load it."

She put her eye protection on, then loaded and unloaded the gun until Flynn was sufficiently less dissatisfied. Then he tugged his ear protection on, waited for her to do the same, and indicated the target.

She emptied the gun, lowered it, and took her finger off the trigger. He looked from the target back to her.

She slipped off her ear protection. "I hit the target," she defended herself.

He just looked at her, and it was really disconcerting, not to mention discouraging, to see such a formidable man look so demoralized.

Then he seemed to pull himself together. "At least you have more spare ammo than I did when I was learning."

Garcia Flynn trying to brace her up might be even worse than Garcia Flynn horrified by her terrible aim.

"Again," he told her. "Aim higher."

She shot again, and again, and again, first with that pistol, then with another he'd brought for her to try. Finally he motioned for her to stop. "Your hands are shaking. That's enough."

She shook out her hands one at a time as he pulled the target off the tree. She'd have bruises from the recoil. "So, Flynn," she said casually. "I'm curious as to what it would take to make you pull another 1931 and arrange to have one of us killed."

He stopped and turned. She watched him realize she had _both_ guns. And, though he'd watched her empty both of them... hadn't he just told her that you always assumed a gun was loaded?

He was quiet for a moment. "I don't think I would," he said finally, and despite everything, she was grudgingly impressed that he took the question seriously instead of focusing on getting the guns away from her. "Why would I? None of you are Rittenhouse any more. We're on the same team."

"And if one of us betrayed the team?"

"If any of us betrayed the team to Rittenhouse, don't you think we'd want to be stopped?"

She thought about that, sighed, and put the guns in the bag. "Thanks for the lesson."

"There'll be more."

She hoisted the bag and started towards the house.

"Jiya."

She stopped and looked back.

Flynn looked at her. "I find that... regret is mostly useless," he told her, quiet and _hesitant_ in a way she'd never seen. "Because it doesn't change anything. But take it from me: there's a path from here that you could walk, and I... don't know that you want to."

She watched him for a moment, strangely touched. He thought she had the capacity to do something like he'd done after the death of his family... and he was expending effort to dissuade her?

"I told you," she said finally. "I'm not going to go on a multi-century killing spree." She had other ways to— "Flynn."

Raised eyebrows.

"If we can get what Lucy and Wyatt 2.0 told us about working..." She trailed off, because the way his expression had turned impassive told her he was following her, all right.

He stared at her for a long moment, then brushed past her, took the bag from her, and headed back to the house.

#

"You can let yourself in next time," Flynn told her.

Lucy had made an honest effort to sleep on the couch, tossing and turning until she fell into uneasy, sweaty dreams dominated by giant mosquitoes and Jessica Logan. She'd woke to find a mosquito eagerly whining about her head, resuming its interrupted meal in a new spot each time she swatted. The screens in this house were just as rundown as the rest of it.

She'd squashed the mosquito, sat up, and pushed her sweaty hair back from her face. Then she'd padded over to Flynn's door.

Now she said, "Okay." Counting on the fact that he was tired and pained, she slid past him to the chair.

Flynn gestured to the bed.

"Absolutely not," she told him.

"You won't be comfortable in the chair."

"And you would? I don't have a chest wound." She crossed her arms and stared up at him. She was pretty sure _it hurts to lie down_ wasn't the entire truth, because he could lie on his side. "Take the damn bed, Flynn."

He folded with a tired smile, and sat down on the bed. "Fine."

She tried a couple of different positions, self-conscious of Flynn listening to her shifting. First she propped her feet up on the desk, but she wasn't a giant like him, so that didn't work. She sat up and tucked her legs up beside her, resting against the soft back of the chair. That was comfortable for a few minutes, but not restful. Finally, determined to stop moving, she slouched down, put her head on one armrest, and let her legs dangle over the other. The chair was sized and shaped just right to support everything she wanted supported. She rolled over and buried her head in the back of the chair...

She woke to raucously cheerful birds announcing dawn. Well, she could have slept about three more hours, but she'd take it.

She sat up cautiously, aware that Flynn probably wouldn't sleep through her leaving. Sure enough, as soon as her chair creaked softly, his eyes opened to slits.

He looked at her with an unguarded warmth that startled her with its occurrence, considering his condition, if it did not surprise her with its existence.

"Uh, good morning," she said.

"Good morning." His voice was rough and soft.

"Thanks for letting me stay."

"I told you. Any time." He visibly braced himself—

Lucy made it over the side of the armrest and to the dresser before he swung his legs out of bed. She reached for the orange bottle there, raising her eyebrows as he winced.

He nodded, but said, "I didn't invite you to stay so I could take advantage of your nursing skills, Lucy."

Lucy snorted. "Yeah, it takes a lot of skill to open a childproof bottle." She shook out the pill and handed it to him. "When I was ten, I decided I wanted to help people. I told my mom I wanted to be a nurse."

Flynn washed it down with a few swallows of water. "And?"

"She said, 'Aim higher, dear.'"

Flynn looked neither surprised nor impressed. Lucy put the bottle back.

"I feel so guilty about missing her," she whispered, surprising herself. At some point, he'd become the person she could tell almost anything. Not necessarily _should_... but _could_.

He had, after all, read her journal almost to the point of memorizing it.

Flynn got his feet on the ground, wincing. "Why?"

"Because— she was Rittenhouse."

"She was still your mom."

Yes. Mom had still been the one to cheer Lucy's successes and condole over her failures— with generous doses of constructive criticism, of course— to tend her when she was sick, to help her when she needed it. But how much of that had been real, and how much had been to mold Lucy into the perfect Rittenhouse agent?

"I don't even know if— if I'm grieving her, or the person I thought she was. Or— the chance to see if that person could ever be real." She turned abruptly to the window as she teared up. She watched the birds busy in the old oak tree, and tried to steady herself. "I don't know—"

And she felt so guilty about that, too, because— Mom had told her that— God, Lucy could hardly bear to remember it, but her life now was doing a lot of things she could hardly bear. Mom had told her that she most regretted not inducting her sooner. But letting Lucy grow up in ignorance so long suggested... ambivalence.

"I think she died saving my life and I don't think I would bring her back if I could," Lucy blurted out.

She regretted the fuss she was making when Flynn came to stand next to her at the window. He was quiet for a moment or two before he spoke. "That says more about her than it does about you, Lucy," he said quietly. "And I think this is hard enough without you feeling guilty over things you— can't change."

"Right," she said, looking up at him. "Because you have a monopoly on that."

"What, making you feel guilty?" he asked, too innocently. "Something on your conscience, Lucy?"

She stared at him in disbelief, then gave him a Look, but couldn't quite smother her smile. And— it felt good. To smile.

How in hell had _Flynn_ become the one to whom she could tell anything, the one who made her smile, the one with whom she felt... at _ease_ , in a way she hadn't felt in a long, long time?

And in a way that surprised her, considering what _else_ she'd felt around him, a few times. Maybe that was a fluke. Right?

"The, uh, the shower's free," she said. "Do you want it first?"

He shook his head. "I want to give the medicine time to work."

"How does it feel?"

"Like a chest wound," he said drily.

"I mean— how are you _doing?_ "

"I've had worse. I'll be fine."

Was this what her future held? This level of resigned stoicism about being shot?

Someday, she wanted to know just how much Flynn knew about her future. Or alternate-her's past. But not now. She didn't think she could take it now.

"All right. Well. Thanks..." Another awkward but sincere smile, and she—

"Lucy, wait."

She stopped and turned halfway to the door.

Flynn hesitated, then closed the distance between them, staring down at her with a seriousness that—

Why did her heart choose that moment to speed up?

"Lucy..." He touched his tongue to his lip. "How'd you..." Pause. "Know about my father?"

 _What? Oh_. "I, uh... Something in your file, together with something Rufus said after 1919."

He grimaced.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't've said anything."

He looked down, face inscrutable.

"And..." She looked down, then back up. "I'm sorry."

He turned away. "Go, uh..." He cleared his throat. "Go shower before someone else takes it."

"Right. Um... thanks."

#

"Connor's not wrong," Lucy told Jiya, as they both sat at the kitchen table, thunder cracking violently outside.

Jiya had been working since an ungodly hour of the morning when she'd woken from a nightmare about Rufus, decided she'd had enough, and stumbled down to the Batcave. She'd pushed herself until her head was spinning, then grudgingly decided to stop to eat breakfast before doing some simulator runs. She'd come upstairs and discovered it was well past noon.

Jiya took a huge bite, chewed, and eventually swallowed. "About what?"

"I think Rittenhouse as we knew it is... gone."

Jiya looked at her.

"They're a secret society obsessed with bloodlines and genetic purity," Lucy added. "What we have now is a megalomaniac with a time machine."

"She's still just as dangerous. If not more so."

Lucy nodded. "But harder to predict." Her expression was dark and determined in a way Jiya had never seen before 1888.

"Rittenhouse wasn't easy to predict to begin with."

They ate in silence for a few minutes. "How do you think she'll... change it?" Jiya asked.

Lucy considered. "It grated on her that she didn't have the bloodlines," she said finally. "She would've been willing to be the power behind the throne, but now that we've mostly wiped it out, she won't bring it back like that. She'll build something new, on merit, not blood. Full of people indebted or blackmailed into helping her, like..."

Like Jessica Logan.

"But if the Rittenhouse name will help her, she'll use it," Lucy added.

Jiya considered this. "Then you're her biggest threat," she pointed out. "If she really wants to displace the bloodline thing. You're the last surviving, uh..."

"Heir of Slytherin?"

Jiya's mouth twitched. "As long as you're alive, there's always the chance that you could bring Rittenhouse 1.0 back."

Lucy shuddered. Then thought. "I am, aren't I? I wonder if I could..."

Jiya stared. "Uh, Lucy?"

"No, I'm just... I'm wondering if we could use that somehow. My sperm donor is... still alive, far as I know..." Lucy's forehead creased.

Did Jiya want to know what she was thinking?

"There are more straightforward ways to get what she wants," Lucy said after a minute. Presumably that followed from something she'd said to herself.

"Which is?"

"Control." Lucy's face was impassive.

Jiya remembered those nights listening, watching, as Lucy didn't sleep.

"You know, maybe the imprisoned Rittenhouse members are a bigger threat to Emma," Lucy said after a minute, in a tone closer to normal. "Because she knows _I'm_ not going to suddenly... um... she knows that someone else would have to make me a figurehead. And who else would it be?"

"I wonder if she's going after them in the present day," Jiya said. "Hunting them down."

"If she is, do we stop her?"

Their eyes met. Jiya remembered what Flynn had said just— yesterday, the day before, all the days were running together— about the team not being Rittenhouse any more. In answer to the question _under what circumstances would you kill us?_

"Another thing to ask Denise," Lucy added after a minute. Denise had been there the first night they'd arrived, and they had a way to get a hold of her any time, day or night, but... them being based on the other side of the country, now, made it a lot harder for her to physically _be_ here.

They finished eating. "Can you use help downstairs?" Lucy asked. "I don't have a lot to do at the moment besides... try to guess what Emma will attack next."

Jiya could always use help downstairs, except—

"Oh, come on, I'm not _that_ bad."

Jiya smiled. "All right. You can read off the diagnostics panel to me. Save me from having to crawl out from and under the Lifeboat every time."

Lucy nodded. "You know, I'd like to know more about how it works."

"The Lifeboat?"

"Well, really about how to fix it."

Jiya felt a wave of misgiving about Lucy Preston, historian extraordinaire and general all-around badass but not necessarily _mechanic_ extraordinaire, tinkering with the Lifeboat. "Not a bad thing to spread that knowledge, I guess."

Lucy grabbed their plates. Jiya followed her to the sink to refill her water bottle. The water here was atrocious, flat and bitter. It hardly tasted like water. Maybe that was why she kept getting dehydrated. Well, that, and it feeling like a hundred and ten degrees in the house.

"Rufus calls it—" Jiya stopped.

It hit her all over again.

 _I forgot, I forgot for a moment, how could I_ forget _?_

Lucy turned to her with a really unhelpful expression of sympathy.

"Rufus _called_ it—" Jiya tried again, forcing the words past her closing throat. "He called it—"

She pushed the pain away. She had no time for this, not if she was going to get him back.

She made the mistake of remembering. "It's cross-training for geeks, Jiya," Rufus had told her, seeing the expression on her face at the variety of titles in the stack of books she'd just tripped over. He'd helped her pick them up. "You okay?" He'd taken her by her elbow, fingers warm against her skin, and gently helped her to her feet. Then, because this had been months before they'd started dating, he'd stared at her with the awkwardness that, in retrospect, was heartbreakingly endearing.

A quiet sob burst out of her and then she couldn't stop. Lucy's face of pity and dismay went straight to Jiya's already-tattered heart as the other woman put her arms around Jiya and held her tight. Somehow, they ended up on the floor. Jiya tried to stay quiet, because if she gave in to this temptation to wail, to voice the grief that was tearing her apart, she might never quit. But she shook, and shook, and— Rufus was—

She slowly realized that Lucy was crying too. "I'm sorry," Lucy sniffled. "Jiya, I'm so sorry."

Jiya just clung to her more tightly.

Slowly, she wound down. She—

"Damn you," Wyatt's voice came, " _let_ me—"

Jiya looked up. Wyatt was trying to push his way into the kitchen, but Flynn was standing in his way, in the doorway with his back to them. How long had _he_ been there?

Wyatt looked past Flynn. He saw them, and looked abashed. "... Oh. Sorry... sorry, Jiya." He backed away, but hissed to Flynn, "I know what you're doing with this _supportive_ shit—"

Lucy handed Jiya a paper towel as the conversation thankfully passed out of hearing range. Jiya wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "Sorry."

Lucy shook her head. "Don't be. Don't be, Jiya. Rufus was— he was incredible. He was one of the most amazing people I've ever known."

"Don't talk about him like he's gone," Jiya snapped. "We're going to get him back."

"I know."

"We _are,_ " she insisted. "He's not going to be like y—"

She stopped. Too late.

Lucy just smiled sadly. "Like Amy?"

"... I'm sorry, Lucy."

Lucy shook her head. "Don't be." She paused. "I tried to kill her," she said abruptly. "Emma. But I couldn't hit the broad side of a damned barn. I'm sorry too, Jiya."

"Flynn's teaching me to shoot." Jiya belatedly glanced over her shoulder to make sure he was gone. "I bet he'd teach you too."

Lucy nodded slowly. "Now. Since we _are_ getting Rufus back, why don't we go downstairs, you can, uh, work on the systems, I can read the lights off and watch and learn to be a little less of a menace with... anything involving my hands. Okay?" She got to her feet, gave Jiya a small smile that made her think, suddenly, that Amy Preston had been really lucky in her accident of big sisters, and offered her a hand up.

Jiya nodded, and took Lucy's hand.

#

Denise returned the afternoon Jiya managed to shave 17.3 miles off the 95% probability radius for the Mothership. "Still includes all of New York City," Jiya reported. "But the highest probability is somewhere in the Bronx."

"Makes sense, I guess," Lucy said. "They really seem to like their empty old warehouses, and there's certainly more of those in the Bronx than, say, Midtown."

"Something the size of the Mothership, you kind of need a warehouse," Wyatt agreed. "Okay. Check all the warehouses in the Bronx. No problem, should only take me three or four... months."

"Well, we've raided two of their bases now," Denise said. "We have some idea of their financials. I've put some agents on it— and Flynn's been doing some forensic accounting."

Jiya glanced at Flynn, surprised. She hadn't even known that was part of his skillset. He looked grimmer than usual, and didn't make eye contact with anyone.

"We have a list of possibilities with ties to Rittenhouse," Denise continued. "You'll start there. Wyatt, there's a car waiting in Gainesville. We can leave whenever you're ready."

"What if Emma's not with the Mothership?" Jiya asked. "What if she hid it somewhere secure as— bait? Or distraction?"

"If Emma's not with the Mothership, then I blow the damn thing up," Wyatt said. "If she _is_ with the Mothership, I still blow the damn thing up."

"This is _only_ an intel gathering mission," Denise said. "Try not to blow _anything_ up in the most densely populated city in the country, please."

"Should you be going alone?" Lucy asked.

Wyatt shrugged. "Flynn's still grounded. We need Jiya and Connor here." He glanced up. "You wanna come?" His tone was very casual, but his eyes were not.

Long pause. Jiya looked away from Lucy, because everyone else was already staring at her.

"It's too dangerous," Denise said finally. "Sorry, Lucy, but you'll stay here."

Lucy nodded once. She and Wyatt avoided looking at each other.

"Wyatt won't actually be alone, though," Denise added with a little smile.

"Are you going?" Connor asked.

"No. Wyatt, I've arranged for you to have some backup. You'll pick him up in Atlanta."

Wyatt frowned. "Who is this guy? Is he any good?"

"You tell me. I think you know him a little. Master Sergeant Dave Baumgardner?"

Wyatt's eyes lit up in a way they hadn't since— before. "Bam-Bam!" Then he frowned. "I thought—" Quick glare at Flynn. "I thought he was dead."

Denise frowned. "Why would he be dead?"

Wyatt and Lucy both looked like someone had stuck an eggbeater into their thought processes. "Because—" Wyatt began.

"But then you—" Lucy said.

Wyatt shook his head. "... never mind." He looked at Denise. "Ready whenever you are."

"Be careful, Wyatt," Lucy said, as he and Denise both headed towards the ladder.

Wyatt smiled in that same casual-but-not-fooling-anyone way—

"Yeah, try to come back in one piece," Flynn added.

Wyatt looked totally nonplussed. Jiya couldn't blame him. Flynn still had that same pinched look on his face, and still didn't look at anyone. What was that about? Was he chafing at not being able to go? He was obviously still in pain, and he was still wearing the sling most of the time.

Without Wyatt, the house seemed bigger and more peaceful— Jiya no longer made any bones about admitting things like that to herself. The next evening, at Connor's severe prodding, she emerged from the Batcave to actual daylight. She was greeted with news: Wyatt and this other guy had reached the city. Also, they now, courtesy of Flynn, had a solar shower hanging outside the barn to augment the one in the bathroom. She was also handed a plate of reheated leftovers— actual food, again, strangely enough, thanks to Flynn.

The others kept her company in the living room as she ate. A certain constraint had vanished, and while none of them wanted to admit it, she thought they all felt it.

"Have you been, um... trancing?" Lucy asked her, softly, during a lull in the conversation.

"No." Jiya took a pointedly large bite. By the time she'd chewed and swallowed, Connor had introduced another topic.

Jiya was grateful. Lucy's well-meant question had reminded her of the gut blow of not being able to see Rufus anywhere. Any _when_.

She came back to herself to find Lucy watching her with concern and apology. Jiya gave her a tiny head-shake. Just what she needed to do, give Lucy one more thing to worry about.

"What does Emma _want_?" Connor was asking. "It's not loyalty to Rittenhouse that drives her, because she killed—" An apologetic glance at Lucy. "The rest of them. They wanted to rule the world, or at least the country. But what about _her_?" Pause. "Flynn, you knew her better than any of us, didn't you?"

Flynn shook his head. "I had no idea who she really was."

"None of us did," Connor muttered. "To fake her death and hide out in past Missouri seems like such a long-shot chance," he mused. "Just— what? In case someone stole a time machine? In case they needed a backup pilot?"

"She claimed it was a loyalty test," Flynn said.

"But that doesn't make any sense," Connor said. "She's clearly devastatingly effective, why would they stash her out of the way for that long?"

"It is really a long shot," Lucy agreed. "Unless she knew something we don't. Unless... this isn't her first trip through these events."

She glanced at Flynn. They all digested that unpleasant idea.

"Obviously, in the future, someone invents the ability to travel in your own timeline," Lucy continued. "Maybe future Emma told herself to do it. A future Emma from a timeline where... what? Anthony succeeded in destroying the Mothership? And somehow Rittenhouse lost?"

Flynn looked grim at the reminder of his compound failures.

"I hope Wyatt's all right," Lucy murmured.

"I hope he doesn't run into Jessica," Flynn said.

They all looked at him.

"I mean, what exactly is he gonna do? He's made it clear he can't shoot her. And once Emma figures that out..."

"He'll do the right thing," Lucy said quietly.

Flynn and Jiya both stared at her in disbelief. "You do remember that the last time Wyatt tried to do ' _the right thing_ ,' it ended with Jessica kidnapping Jiya and—"

"Flynn, he's _not_ _here_. Can you just— stop?"

Flynn stopped talking, to Jiya's slight disappointment. He wasn't wrong. She'd forgiven them for coming after her, but when she'd learned that Wyatt had _known_ something was up with Jessica's past and had _kept his mouth shut..._

Conversation lapsed. That train of thought led her to its natural conclusion. "I don't think I know how to save Rufus," Jiya admitted quietly.

"You'll work the equations out—"

She shook her head, cutting Connor off. "It's not the equations. It's the timing. Do we go back and grab him out of the saloon? Right before—" She swallowed. "But then, there's no need for me to have invented this in the first place. And what happens if we bring him right back here— he's missing a chunk of his life that we've all lived. Time, I mean." She looked at Connor. "No one knows exactly how this works. Even you. All we have are guesses." She remembered Connor's amazement at Lucy's carrying her locket with Amy's picture from the original timeline to the post-Hindenburg timeline.

"We've disproved the grandparent paradox, remember? So when we go back and save Rufus, we'll be shunted to a new timeline, but the technology will persist, because we'll have brought it with us from the old timeline. Well. You will. I suppose I won't remember this conversation at all. Strictly speaking, this version of me would never see this version of you again."

Lucy and Flynn exchanged significant looks.

Five minutes in, Flynn escaped to the kitchen. When Connor brought the big whiteboard down from his bedroom— and Jiya had _no idea_ how he'd gotten that damn thing, way out here in the sticks, but she wasn't actually surprised— Lucy followed Flynn. Two hours later, Jiya and Connor reached a tentative consensus on the points on which they might be able to reach consensus. Flynn and Lucy had disappeared. To Flynn's room, presumably, because Jiya was still sitting on the couch.

Jiya yawned. "Right, good planning," she said. "Time for some simulator runs."

Connor gave her a reproachful look. "You should sleep."

"I can look after myself just fine," she snapped. "I did it for three years, remember?"

She climbed down the ladder into the Batcave before he could argue with her.

#

That night, Lucy brought the couch cushions.

Flynn watched, tired and amused, as she laid them out between the dresser and the desk. "You're gonna sleep on the floor?"

"On cushions on the floor, which is where I've been sleeping anyway." When she wasn't here. At first, she'd slept in front of the couch, because it was marginally cooler near the floor. Then the exposure had gotten to be too much for her, and she'd slept behind the couch.

She shook her head. "I hate small tight spaces. I can't believe I'm saying a room is too open to sleep in."

He watched her for a moment. "War has a way of changing your, uh, preferences."

 _War_. If she'd learned two years ago that she would time travel, and that she would be fighting a war, she'd've been more inclined to believe the former.

 _War_. Did that make her a soldier? She wasn't a soldier. Wyatt and Flynn were soldiers. So what was she?

 _Not very helpful, honestly, Lucy_. Her mother's voice narrated a quick highlights reel of her fight with Emma—

Lucy shoved all that away, and stretched out on her cushions. Just as comfortable as cushions on any other patch of floor. "'night," she muttered.

"Good night, Lucy."

#

She woke the next morning, too tired to want to get up, but too alert to sleep again. It was daylight already. She found herself staring at Flynn's broad shoulders, and... wondering.

Before that disastrous meeting, before he'd been dragged off to prison and she to Rittenhouse, sometimes he'd looked at her like a drowning man might look at land. Like he'd already resigned himself to damnation, but instinct made him throw out one last... plea.

But now that desperate need was gone from his eyes. As often as not, lately, she felt like _she_ needed _him_ to steady her.

When, how, had that happened?

He woke, grimaced, and took his morning pain meds. The prescription bottle was not empty, but he'd switched to something over-the-counter. It didn't surprise her to learn he pushed himself like that.

He must've noticed her watching him as soon as he'd woke, but he let the silence stretch out for a moment. "What?" he asked finally.

She considered. "How exactly did you leave prison _less_ bitter than before?" she asked finally.

Because she remembered talking to him in prison, when he'd been on _edge_.

He studied her in turn, and she suspected she'd get even more of an answer than she'd bargained for.

His face changed. He looked a little abashed. "In São Paulo," he began, slowly. He ran the tip of his tongue over his upper lip. He thought some more.

She hadn't expected the conversation to go there. Thinking of that meeting in his past, and, apparently, her future, made her deeply uncomfortable. Since one Lucy had already gone back in time and changed history, would she still need to do it? Or— only if something went terribly wrong—

"I... fled, when the police decided I was their suspect. I took care not to be noticed. She..."

Another long pause.

"That Lucy was... the first person since they died to look at me with anything besides anger, hostility, or indifference. You— she..."

He hesitated. Lucy had the feeling he was rejecting several different ways to continue.

"And then she gave me the journal," he finally did continue. "It was the only hope I had. I—" He looked down at his hands. "Probably imprinted on you a little."

She pictured him as a lethal gosling, and snorted. His own expression lightened briefly, an echo of that smile that had the power to warm her, before he continued.

"Then I met you." He gestured at her, specifying _which_ version of her he meant. "You were... different."

She considered and rejected some words of her own.

"She'd believed me, but you didn't. And I needed to convince you." Suddenly his words flowed freely. "You were the only thing I had going for me and I _needed_ to—" She heard an echo of his desperation from those days. "And I couldn't. I kept waiting for you to change. You didn't. You— some version of you had given me the journal, _set_ me on this course, but _you_ thwarted me at every turn. I couldn't understand it. Was I wrong? Why wasn't— Until— for a moment, I thought—" He looked away. "I thought we were finally on the same side."

Lucy winced. Would she ever not feel a stab of guilt over that ambushed meeting? "We were," she said quietly.

"In prison, I..." He looked up. "I thought I knew you, by then. I knew if it had really been an accident on your part— you would have been there. And you weren't."

"I was—"

"I know." No judgement, no emotion at all, in those flat words, as he looked away again. "I had... a _lot_ of time to think in prison, and _nothing_ else. No plans. No hope. I'd sold my soul to stop Rittenhouse, and... it wasn't enough. And from the questions they asked me, I knew the Mothership was gone. It wasn't hard then to figure out about Emma. That was, ahhh..."

"The lowest point," he continued after a long silence. "Even if you hadn't stopped me from detonating that building, I know now what Emma is. I have to believe that she was playing along only as far as it suited her."

"And then—" His pauses were getting longer. "You came back." Pause. "You'd somehow... come around. In the end. To a similar place as the Lucy I met in São Paulo. But you weren't— her." Pause. "You and she..." He hesitated. "I think you were the only two people, since the night Rittenhouse killed my family, to truly _look_ at me and see a human being." The longest pause yet. He ran his tongue nervously over his lips. "So I... believed you."

She had no idea what she'd expected, but this was definitely not it.

He looked up and met her eyes, and suddenly she couldn't look away. "That was the second time some version of you gave me back something I thought I'd lost forever," he added. "First... hope. Then... my humanity. Lucy, I won't forget that."

She stared at him. Blankly. What the hell could she say after _that?_

He waited patiently for her to collect her thoughts. That warmth she'd seen in his eyes humbled her. To have a role in someone's _salvation_...

But if you couldn't help someone when they were beyond helping themselves, then why were you even on this planet?

"So," she finally managed. "All those times you were calling out my naiveté...?"

He suddenly looked amused. "You want to be an I-told-you-so now?"

She tilted her chin up. "Yes. I think I do."

He broke out into an unfairly attractive smile, the one she'd first seen in his room that first morning. He glanced down, moistened his lips, then looked up at her from under his eyelashes. "You were right, Lucy. And... I was wrong."

That smile sparked heat in her blood. She felt a _completely_ untoward desire to cross the small space to his bed and, and...

She swallowed. "Well," she said lightly. "Now I know."

#

"You moved the target." Jiya felt let down. She'd been getting... less awful.

"Yes. From point blank to _almost_ point blank."

She sighed, and went through the now-familiar routine of putting on her goggles and her ear protection, loading the gun, firing, and reloading. The added distance erased whatever improvements she'd made since her first session. Damn it.

How different it was for him than for her. Her mind went down the dark path of considering just how many shots he'd probably fired in his life. And how many of those had hit someone's flesh.

She sweated in the heat and humidity, and her ridiculous orange earmuffs slipped. She lowered the gun, tugged them off, and wiped her face. "You know, Anthony was a good man."

Flynn looked at her dispassionately. "So was Abraham Lincoln, by most accounts," he said. "So was Lieutenant Colonel Travis. Would you like a categorical list of all the good men I've killed?"

She looked back at him.

His mouth curled into a sneer. "What exactly were you expecting, Jiya? That I would beat my breast and wail?" He nodded at the gun. "If you're going to shoot, shoot. If you're going to moralize, you don't need me for that."

"I can multitask," she muttered, fixing her earmuffs and emptying the gun.

He studied her latest hits. "Doesn't look like it."

His sarcasm, though pointed, never really smarted. It was clear that he was critical of her aim _now_ , not her prospects for improvement. If he'd thought she was hopeless, he wouldn't be wasting his time. And he patiently adjusted her aim, her grip, her stance, over and over, in between giving her bits of useful advice.

"You're good at this," she told him when she stopped to half-drain her water bottle.

She thought he was going to ignore that, like he did with most positive comments, but after a minute he said, "I've trained people all over the world. Some worse than you," he assured her. "Boys who jump at the noise. Farmers handling antiquated rifles for the first time. Groups without enough bullets to train their people, let alone win a war."

He seemed to speak from vast experience. "You've been doing this a while."

"A few decades."

He wasn't more than, what, forty-five? "You started fighting young, then."

No reply.

"Why?"

He gave her the Look that indicated she'd exceeded the Flynn Personal Information Tolerance. "Independence." The word came out strangely clipped.

She didn't push the subject. She didn't think she wanted to know more. And if she did, well, she could consult their resident subject expert.

#

Jiya's life improved substantially when she found the Pocket.

She spent a lot of time on her back on the floor, and occasionally she stared at the ceiling. That was how she noticed the pucker in the rock off to the side of the ladder.

She looked at it first dully, then speculatively. It was clear that you couldn't reach it from the ladder, unless you got bit by an irradiated flying squirrel or something. But it wasn't _that_ far.

She took some good, sturdy rope from the Lifeboat's emergency kit and tied it to the top of the ladder, double-checking the knot. She pushed off from the ladder and swung towards the crevice with an exhilarating rush. She came up short. She pushed off again and again. She snatched at the stone lip, scraping her hand, before gravity pulled her away. Her next swing fell short. The next—

She grabbed the edge, pushed herself up, and rolled awkwardly into the little hollow, keeping tight hold of the rope.

The space was bigger than it looked from the outside. The stone floor rose from the entrance, making a bit of a lip, then sloped gently down and backwards, kind of like a... stone pita pocket. She could sit up at the tallest point. She felt around and brushed out some dead bugs. No rodents or snakes could get up here, and they hadn't seen any actual bats in the Batcave.

She felt very pleased with herself. It was private; surrounded by stone, the little hollow was pleasantly cool; and from here, she could see without easily being seen. Her three years in Chinatown had given her a new appreciation for watching. For just a moment, things were less bad.

Over the next day or so, she stashed supplies up there: a large canteen of water, some snacks, and a spare blanket— no one would miss that in this heat. Then she borrowed one of Connor's fancy power tools, that Denise had acquired for him, and set a proper anchor in the lip. She still loved rock climbing, even if it had been nearly four years since her last weekly climbing date with Stasia, her old roommate.

It was the perfect place to go and not be disturbed, to get as much solitude as her bladder would permit. Sometimes she just needed... space, out of sight, to silently fall apart without worrying the others. Other times, she took her notebook and tablet up where no one could interrupt her or worry over her, and worked on the equations.

Those were honestly a nightmare.

Rufus had to still be dead, in whatever future the TTL 2.0 had come back to avert. Because, whoever had worked all this out— had it been her?— it was lacking. It assumed knowledge Jiya didn't _have_.

And what she was doing right now was really Rufus's specialty. She understood it, theoretically, but he was the one with the PhD in physics, the years of background in all this, well, theory. Jiya had always focused on the equations more with an eye to implementing them in code, not understanding their every nuance in their own right.

But Rufus wasn't here, and she had to do it alone.

Sometimes the anticipation of failure overwhelmed her. It was a dizzying feeling of shame, grief, guilt, past mourning, and future mourning. _Only way out is through_ , she reminded herself so often she probably should get it tattooed on her somewhere. But _through_ seemed like pushing through a stone wall with her bare hands.

Today... today the equations were a little more tractable. She'd grasped almost at once that the basic idea behind traveling in your own timeline and not disintegrating was to _push_ an infinitesimally wide bubble of the present day back with you to the past, keeping a connection open. Doing so would protect you. Why it did not disintegrate the _universe_ was the question. Today, she was making headway understanding why and how.

She'd come to expect that when she emerged from the Batcave, someone would hand her dinner. But that night she climbed up in the middle of a conclave: Wyatt was back. His face was bruised, he was limping, and he didn't look happy. It didn't take him long to tell them all what he'd found— or hadn't found.

"I can go back as soon as—"

"And do what?" Flynn broke in impatiently. "Get beat up again?"

Wyatt smoldered. "And what exactly did _you_ accomplish while I was gone? Oh, that's right. Nothing."

"Actually, Flynn helped me replace all the wiring in the nav calibration antenna," she said.

"We're all doing our best," Connor broke in. "We'll find them, somehow. There has to be a finite number of places they can go to ground, and it sounds like you just narrowed that list substantially."

Wyatt looked vaguely appeased.

"I have some ideas for how to narrow the search radius even further," Connor added. "I've asked Denise for the parts."

"She back in California?"

Connor nodded.

Jiya didn't realize how quickly she'd gotten used to that after-dinner camaraderie that had, strangely, sprung up, until it was gone. No conversation that night, or strategizing, or three hours of physics with Connor. Instead she grabbed a protein bar and disappeared back to the Batcave for the night shift. Subconsciously— she'd been hoping, hadn't she, that Wyatt would find Emma and finish this whole damn thing.

He'd fucked up badly, but it wasn't fair to put this particular failing on him; as a soldier he excelled, and she knew he'd done his best.

Had... Jessica been there, though?

Anyway. She didn't need his brooding and he didn't need her resentment. And she really, _really_ didn't need his reaction if and when he realized where Lucy was spending most of her nights lately. Jiya didn't think there was anything there, but...

She just was not touching that with a ten foot stick.

She worked until she was seeing things, then emerged, ravenous, and went to search for leftovers.

#

Lucy closed the door quietly behind her. At this early hour, the house was silent. She hoped Jiya was asleep for once—

"What are you doing?"

Lucy jumped, spun, accidentally elbowed the wall, and dropped her clothes. Damn it. "Wyatt!" She scrambled to pick them up. "You nearly gave me a heart attack. I'm going to shower. Did you want it first?"

"I mean in there."

"I can't sleep in the living room right now. It's too—" She swallowed. "I can't."

"So share with Jiya."

"I'm not going to disturb her. She deserves her space right now."

"I'll switch with Jiya and you can bunk in with me."

"We're not disturbing Jiya," Lucy repeated.

"I'll switch with _Flynn_ and you can bunk in with me."

"Wyatt." She looked at him.

Unwillingly, he subsided.

Even tired and grief-stricken as he was, he was still as damnably handsome as when she'd first fallen in love with him. Still as hotheaded, courageous, devoted, and all his other attractive qualities. It would be so easy, to— to— She knew if she gave him any indication that she wanted this again, wanted _him_...

And she did.

But— something— had changed. Maybe she was just weary, of war, of loss. Maybe she was gun-shy after last time. Maybe— a lot of things.

Maybe _she_ had changed.

But his attitude towards Jessica amounted to "good riddance!" They'd barely been back in the bunker— okay, it had been a few hours, because Denise's doctor friend had patched Flynn up by that point, but still, hardly any time at all— before he'd told her he loved her. Wounded pride? Sour grapes? Or had he discovered that what he'd thought he felt for Jessica was totally illusory?

Remembering how desperate he'd been to deny that she was Rittenhouse, how he'd once described meeting Jessica as a lightning bolt from the heavens, Lucy couldn't believe that. But whatever the answer was, she saw... warning signs. Big flashing ones.

He'd been a safe haven, once.

Maybe she still loved him. But she couldn't trust him. Not with her heart, and, after the terrible decisions he'd made, maybe not even on a mission.

"I just," he said. "You've been through so much, Lucy. You deserve a break, and I don't think _that_ —" He pointed to Flynn's door. "Is a break."

"I can make my own decisions," she snapped.

He looked abashed. "I— I'm sorry, Lucy. You're right. Look, you saw us. We're a team in the future. Like we were before. So tell me how to make things right. _Please_."

"Wyatt..." He was so earnest, and so apologetic, and she so wanted to believe that they were in a place that they could fix things.

Wanted to, but didn't.

She was so _tired_. "I'm just not there right now."

The hurt flickering across his face hurt _her_. "Okay," he said visibly moving past his disappointment. "I understand. This is a bad time and I'm asking too much."

 _Oh, so you've learned something about timing in the last few weeks?_ No, she did _not_ want to be this— this sad, bitter person. "Yes."

"But— Lucy— _Flynn?_ "

 _Wyatt, we have already had this conversation._ "I just want a safe place to sleep."

Revulsion flickered across his face. She realized his misapprehension, but she shouldn't— _didn't_ — have to defend her sex life to him.

They'd already had that conversation, too.

" _Seriously_ , Lucy?"

"I have to shower." She started forward. He at least got out of her way. But she didn't hear his footsteps until she was almost at the bathroom.

She choked up as she started the noisy tap. That startled her. Then it infuriated her. How _dare_ he try to make her feel like this?

If only Rufus were here. The three of them had been an amazing team. Thrown together by chance, they'd evolved into something rock solid. Even that very first night, after getting back from 1937, she'd felt something with them. She'd wanted to see them again. Ideally in, you know, a bar over drinks and not in that damned Lifeboat, but after what they'd been through? You couldn't go through that and still be indifferent to your allies. Teammates.

Now Rufus was dead, and she and Wyatt were fractured. As lovers, as friends, even as teammates.

He'd _known._ That was what hurt the most. _He'd known_ how badly she'd been hurt before, by all the people she'd lost. And then he'd gone and done it too.

It would be so easy to blame Jessica. Lucy wanted to, just like she'd desperately wanted to let Jessica walk away outside of the emergency room and leave Lucy with Wyatt. But Wyatt was an adult. He made his choices.

When Wyatt had fled the bunker, Lucy had called him, and called him, and called him. It was _at_ _least_ a seven hour trip from the bunker to San Diego. Jessica certainly hadn't forced him to ignore Lucy that whole way and let her worry sick.

It would be so easy to pretend that if she got back together with Wyatt, everything would be fine and it would never happen again. But after this last year, she didn't have many illusions left. She wasn't willing to gamble her happiness like that.

She'd stayed in here longer than she had any right. Someone would need to shower soon, or use the toilet, or brush the teeth, or...

She thought back with envy to the day that she'd shared a bathroom just with Amy. That lead, as she was toweling off, to thinking of Amy herself.

Oh, God, Lucy wanted her back. But...

But she didn't think that was possible, any more.

Wow, her day was off to a _great_ start. She dressed quickly, and went to see if iced tea would... help.

#

Voices woke her. Connor and Denise. Damn it, she'd fallen asleep over the equations again, hadn't she? She raised her head, but at least remembered not to sit up all the way and smash into the ceiling of the Pocket. Again.

It sounded like they were talking about a parts list. "... pick it up in Tampa," Denise was saying. "Maybe you and Wyatt?"

"I hate to miss a whole day's work."

"Well, if you get there and the shipment's wrong, it'll be more than a day. And Wyatt won't recognize if something's wrong."

Someone on the ladder. Jiya dropped her head and stayed still, though no one ever looked this way when they went up or down the ladder. It sounded like Wyatt.

"A mission?" he asked on his way down. He sounded a little downcast, but they all sounded like that, these days.

"I want you to take Connor to Tampa to pick up the next parts shipment," Denise said. "Even if he weren't one of the most recognizable people in the country—"

"— on the planet," Connor muttered, and Jiya smiled despite herself.

Denise paused, long enough to be noticed. "—Rittenhouse is still out there."

"Ah," Wyatt said. "Bodyguard duty."

Pause. "Excuse me," Connor said. "Need something in the barn." Jiya heard him walk towards the other ladder.

"Do you have a problem with that?" Denise, understandably, sounded perplexed.

"No, ma'am."

Pause. "Good."

Pause. "Agent Christopher— we could be doing so much more now. Rittenhouse isn't jumping, for whatever reason. Now's the time to strike while they're regrouping, before they— we're a man down, now, and not having a backup pilot is going to hurt us."

"Wyatt, I know you want to find Jessica." Denise continued over Wyatt: "But we don't know where they _are_. They're still in New York City, and they're not using any of the bases we have leads on."

"But Jiya and Connor are working on it. And I'll put out some feelers, you can put out some feelers—"

"You think I _haven't?_ "

"— maybe even Flynn, he says he still has... friends." Wyatt's tone made it clear what he thought of that prospect. "And with all due respect, this isn't about Jessica. I'm worried about the _team_. What happened in 1888 hit us all hard, and Jiya and Connor are busy with the Lifeboat, but the rest of us— we're _stagnant_."

"Jiya and Connor are working on a lot of things," Denise said after a long pause. "Wyatt, 'the rest of you' is three people, one of whom is recovering from a chest wound, and another of whom is grieving her dead mother."

Wyatt's voice dropped. Jiya could still make out his words by straining. "I'm worried about Lucy. I _know_ her, Agent Christopher. Inaction isn't what she needs right now. She needs to be busy. She needs purpose." He made a self-deprecating noise. "You know how she always puts everyone else first."

"Wyatt—"

"She's sleeping with Flynn. Did you know that?"

 _What?_ Jiya wasn't sure what to make of either the allegation, or the fact that it had been made. Did he mean sleeping with or _sleeping with?_

Pause. "Have you been drinking?"

"I had a beer with lunch. It's hot." He sounded defensive.

Long pause. "Look, Wyatt, I'll take your advice about a mission under advisement. But until we have more information, we're stuck. You want us to move, get us some more intel."

"Right," Wyatt said. "Intel."

#

"Where the _hell_ do you get off taking advantage of Lucy like this?"

The voice hissed out of nowhere, startling Jiya. She closed her eyes. She definitely did not need the next installment of this same soap opera.

Apparently, she was going to get it anyway.

She'd settled in at the kitchen table for a few hours, thinking it would be nice to see sunlight. Obvious, it was time to go downstairs. She closed her laptop and waited for the fan to get past its usual panic attack.

"I'm sorry, are you talking to me?" Flynn affected surprise.

From here, Jiya could see Flynn's back and Wyatt's face. Wyatt glared.

"It's just, you mentioned someone taking advantage of Lucy, and, you see, no one is. Well. _I'm_ not."

"You're sleeping with her," Wyatt growled. "And you know what, Flynn? She told me that she was only doing it for _sleeping space_. Which makes you a bastard." He clenched his fists.

Jiya's laptop wound down. She started collecting her papers.

"Sleeping space is the only thing I'm offering her, Wyatt." Flynn did not add 'you idiot'— in words.

"Uh-huh."

Jiya felt guilty. Her hands paused. Lucy hadn't even asked about moving in with her. Had Lucy come to the same conclusion that Jiya had? That Jiya really, really cherished her space right now?

Flynn started to push past Wyatt, then stopped and turned back. Now both men were in profile to Jiya. "Which she only needs, by the way, because _your wife_ , whom _you_ brought to the bunker, was supposed to _kill_ Lucy last time Lucy slept on the couch. So. Take the couch yourself, if you're so damn worried. Or move in with Mason and give Lucy your room. But don't ask her to sleep out there."

Flynn left without waiting for a response. Wyatt stared after him.

They were good suggestions. So why was Jiya sure Wyatt wouldn't take them?

Because an unhealthy drinking habit was a lot harder to hide when you didn't have any space to yourself, that was why.

#

Emma _still_ didn't jump. Connor finished their jury-rigged simulator. Jiya's days alternated between theoretical physics and conceptual stuff when she felt freshest, and simulator runs the rest of the time.

These were long days, with nothing to distract her. No apartment to tend, no friends to see... no Rufus. Nothing to do after work. She could have gone for walks, she supposed, but the idea of trudging through pine trees and mosquitoes— or palm scrub and mosquitoes— did not appeal.

Really, the work itself _was_ the distraction.

Whenever she could, she worked in the Pocket. No one interrupted her there, because no one knew she _was_ there. And stretched out in the little hollow, with her work literally in her face, there was very little to distract her.

Usually.

She wiped some residual dampness from her eyelids. Lucy had come down to read off diagnostic codes for Connor, and when they'd finished one system they'd fallen into reminiscence about Rufus. Overhearing that had felt wonderful and terrible. And it hurt to hear them talking about Rufus like he was _gone_.

Even though he, you know, was.

Now Connor and Lucy had gone up to the sauna— sorry, the "house"— for lunch. Flynn had come down for something— maybe just peace and cool— but he didn't bother Jiya; he was quiet.

One of the trapdoors opened. Jiya wasn't sure about those footsteps. "Where's Connor?" Denise asked. Ah.

"Haven't seen him."

"Huh." But she continued to descend the ladder. Jiya heard her quietly cross the floor. There was a long, curious pause. "Are you sleeping with Lucy?" Denise's voice was very neutral.

Jiya's eyebrows went up.

Jiya had no trouble at all filling that short pause with a variety of possible Flynn facial expressions. "Ah, you've been talking to _Wyatt_ ," Flynn said, voice full of false sarcastic joviality.

"I've been counting and using my eyes." Denise was calm and non-confrontational.

Pause. "I am sometimes sleeping in the same room as Lucy. When she sleeps at all."

"Normally I wouldn't ask," Denise said. "You're adults, you can run your own lives. But—"

"But clearly you did."

"But grief looks different on different people. Sometimes it takes strange forms."

"I guess I deserve that flattering assessment of my character."

"My actual assessment—" Jiya could hear, even from here, how very far Denise was from letting Flynn get under her skin, in the rare gentleness of her tone. "— is that both of you have been hurt almost beyond bearing. Sometimes when you're lonely... well. Sometimes anything that stops that seems like a good idea." Denise sounded like she spoke from painful experience that was nevertheless no longer bitter. "And I would hate to see _either_ of you—" Jiya caught the slight emphasis. "— accidentally hurt the other."

Pause. "Any other unsolicited life advice?"

"I'm raising a teenager," Denise said wryly. "Right now all my life advice is unsolicited."

"If you can find a cot, neither of us finds that chair particularly comfortable. Or I can go into town—"

"You're staying here. I'll see what I can do."

"Good talk," Flynn said with more false cheer. "Let's do this again, uh, never."

Retreating footsteps, ladder steps, the trap door closing.

"You hear a lot up there, don't you?"

Jiya felt a startled rush of adrenaline. She looked at both trap doors. Closed. She looked at the Lifeboat. Shut.

He couldn't be talking to _her_. Could he? Cautiously, she eased sideways and pushed herself up to peek over the lip.

Flynn was staring right at her.

"How'd you know I was here?" she demanded.

"Moving into my line of sight and speaking to me was a slight clue."

Damn it, outwitted by an intelligence agent. "So if I hadn't said anything, you'd have been convinced you were talking to an empty room?"

"Possibly." He was studying the Pocket. "How'd you get up there?"

"Sorry, no boys allowed in the secret treehouse."

"You must start from the ladder..." He took a few steps closer.

" _Definitely_ no one-armed boys with chest wounds." Jiya grabbed the rope. She'd hooked a cable wind to the anchor, such that she could jump and coast down with a little friction, and then the rope would pull itself up after her.

Flynn looked mildly impressed when she landed in front of him, but his eyebrows went up when the rope shot back up in the air. He craned his neck, looking around for what he knew had to be there: some way to get the rope down. But braided fishing line was hard to see if you didn't know just where to look, especially against a stone backdrop, especially when it ended in a loop six feet in the air. Jiya usually found it by feel and muscle memory, not by sight.

She considered inviting the rest of the team downstairs to witness Flynn apparently going mad, staring intently into thin air, but decided not to hasten the Pocket's general discovery. She started towards the Lifeboat instead.

"You realize if you slip, Emma wins."

Jiya gave him a cool look. "Depends on how hard I fall."

"Well, until someone finds you in a broken heap on the floor, I won't tell."

She actually believed him, if only because he'd enjoy knowing something the rest of the team didn't. "Thanks."

#

She still knocked before she opened the door, though she was certain he heard her coming.

She frowned at what she saw. The chair had been moved to the short wall opposite the dresser, and a folded cot leaned against the other long wall, parallel to Flynn's bed.

"What's that?"

Flynn opened his eyes. "It's a cot."

"What for?"

"For you. If you want it." He paused. When she didn't say anything, he added, "More, uh, comfortable than the floor."

"Oh. Um. Thanks. You— moved the furniture?"

"We may be able to disarrange time now, but the laws of physics pertaining to space are still pretty rigid."

"You only have one good hand."

"All I needed."

Lucy pictured him pushing or dragging the desk across the floor, one-handed. Jiya must have _loved_ the noise that had made downstairs. Well, honestly, she probably hadn't even noticed.

Lucy put the cushions back, then returned to Flynn's room and opened the cot. She stretched out. Damn it, he was right, this was a _lot_ more comfo—

Something went _click_ and the cot collapsed, leaving her stunned on the floor.

"Lucy?" Flynn crouched beside her. His surprise turned to amusement when he saw she was unhurt. "You've never set up a cot before?" He pulled her up. "Here. Pull on that— put your hand there— now hold it in place."

He showed her how to lock the frame open, doing it deftly, even with one hand. "There."

"Thank you," she said, with as much dignity as she could muster, as he returned to his own bed.

He smirked at her.

Lucy stretched out. Oh, this was _so_ much better than the couch. Than either of the couches. The only thing good about them had been being able to snuggle up against the back, but it was too hot to do that here. And having decent back support more than made up for it.

 _Except there's only ever one season, and that season is winter_ , Rufus had so vividly described occupying the bunker couch.

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to sniffle. It hurt to think about him, but _not_ thinking about him would be so much worse.

She knew it was so, so childish to be confused at how such a good man could die. But she kept forgetting, and walking into the house expecting to see him. Or climbing down the ladder and expecting him to be working on the Lifeboat. Or closing her eyes and listening to Connor and Jiya, and expecting Rufus's voice to chime in.

She'd talked with Connor about Rufus, actually, earlier that day, when Jiya was gone. It had really helped, sharing those memories with someone else who'd loved Rufus. But now...

Now it hurt again.

 _I'm going to,_ we're _going to see him again_ , she promised herself fiercely. _Maybe Rittenhouse took my whole family from me, one way or another, but_ he _is coming_ back.

And, also, the next time she saw Emma, Lucy thought she would just _shoot_ her.

She drifted off...

Lucy woke in the morning to a bright and empty room. Even the birds were quiet outside, which meant it was well into the morning. Good grief, how long had she _slept_?

About nine hours, it turned out. Untroubled by bad dreams, uneasy feelings of exposure, or mosquitoes.

The door opened. She sat up quickly, but it was just Flynn, hair damp from a shower. He'd managed to get his shirt on by himself, which was a good sign of his recovery.

"I didn't mean to sleep so long," she admitted.

"Oh, so my snoring didn't keep you awake?"

Lucy, having never heard Flynn snore, ignored that as bait and provocation.

He folded his pajamas with the ease of long habit, even with only one good hand. "You can stay if you want," he said abruptly.

"... this morning?"

"No. Here. On the cot."

She looked at him blankly.

"Instead of the couch. If this is, uh, better."

"You mean like move in with you?"

He nodded once, and she realized he was nervous.

"I'd... I don't want to take your space."

He relaxed into a sardonic smile. "Compared to some of the places I've been— most recently _prison_ — this is luxury accommodations. I don't mind sharing. Besides, I don't..." He hesitated. "I enjoy your company," he finished quickly.

Lucy was still trying to catch up to this offer.

"The cot's yours if you want it," he said brusquely. "If not, no need to spare my feelings."

There wasn't, was there? She'd never been anything but honest with him. She'd always told him exactly what she thought of him, even when she'd thought he was a monster... and yet here they were.

She looked up and felt as if she were seeing him with fresh eyes. "Yeah, I'll... think about it," she promised, and he did not seem to take it for an evasion. "Thanks."

#

Lucy knocked once and opened the door, a cardboard box under one arm and her little duffel slung over her other shoulder. She'd bring the rest of her books in later.

Flynn was reading. When he saw her, a warm and frankly unfair smile spread across his face.

She put the box and bag containing everything she had down on the cot, and crossed her arms over her chest, then uncrossed them, then shifted from foot to foot.

"Bottom two drawers are yours."

"Thanks." She opened the duffel.

"I thought you'd be better able to reach those."

"You're hilarious."

The act of arranging her clothes in the drawer, stacking the books on the floor by the cot, and putting her few toiletries on the closer edge of the dresser, steadied her. When the duffel and the box were empty, she sat back on her heels. "This is normal to you, isn't it."

Flynn tried to look over his shoulder, thought better of it, and moved to the bed. "What?"

She put the empty bag and box under the cot. "Moving around all the time, taking what you can quickly grab, settling into new places."

He watched her thoughtfully. "... familiar, yes. Normal..." He hesitated. "I'm not really an expert on that."

"Me either," Lucy said. "My _normal_ life was all a lie, so..." The only part of it she wanted back, any more, was Amy.

And what did that say about her job prospects, when all this was over?

The idea that this fight might end, some day, and leave her still standing, felt so fantastical that she couldn't grapple with it right then. She looked around the room instead. The sight of her toothbrush in its mug on the edge of the dresser, with _his_ toothbrush in its own mug on the other edge— something about the prosaic domesticity settled her for a moment. Brought her back to normal things.

"Normal" things.

"Flynn."

She looked up. She realized he didn't have to, because he was still watching her.

"If you change your mind, I want you to tell me."

"Lucy—"

She shook her head, and he stopped talking. "Because if you tell me that you will, I'll trust you," she said quietly. "And I'll stop second-guessing myself."

He watched her for a long moment, expression inscrutable but not at all hard. "If I ever want you to go," he promised finally, "I'll tell you."

"Thank you."

#

Lucy woke staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Again.

A warm breeze and the low _hum_ of a box fan prodded her mind: Flynn's room.

 _Their_ room?

He wasn't there. But on the heels of that observation, the door opened, and he came in, hair wet, dressed, but with bare feet. That was strangely endearing.

He offered her a tentative smile as he put down his shower things, then folded his pajamas.

She stretched. "Amazing how much better I feel after... actually sleeping."

His smile did not broaden, but he looked so deeply satisfied that she was startled. Something of that must have shown in her expression; he looked startled, himself, and his face immediately became blank and neutral.

"Thank you," she added.

He looked a little irritated. "You can't keep thanking me, Lucy."

"I _can_ ," she pointed out. When had he become so delightfully teasable? "I think you're trying to say you don't _want_ me to."

He looked down at her. It was clear to her he was trying not to smile.

This was her life now: Garcia Flynn smiled at her on a regular basis, and she teased him. She didn't really know how that had happened. But God, she was so thankful it had.

It dawned on her that he was fidgeting rather aimlessly with the few things on his side of the dresser. "I want to teach you to fight," he said abruptly.

Her merriment vanished.

"I'm sorry," he added quietly. "I know that's not what you want."

"Want, no," she said slowly. She stared down at her own bare toes so she didn't have to look at him. "Need..."

 _I know what you're really meant to be, Lucy, and it's not a teacher_.

Lifeboat Lucy flashed vividly in Lucy's mind, that self-assured soldier who'd carried herself with ease. And the woman Flynn had met in São Paulo, whom he'd called _very impressive_ —

Usually it was the past reaching long, ghostly fingers out to her. Now it was her future. _So this it how it starts?_

Was this who she had to become to save Rufus? If so— how could she possibly have these qualms?

But she did, oh, she did.

She realized that his feet were now in her field of vision, too. "May I, ah, sit?" he asked.

The odd formality of that question was strangely comforting. She slid over to make room. The cot shifted under his weight.

She looked up after a long quiet moment. "I've killed two men."

He hadn't known that, she could tell. But his expression showed no shock, no disgust. If he felt concern, he mercifully spared her from it.

"So I don't know why this... bothers me so much," she added.

"Yes, you do."

She tried to collect herself behind a facade of firm acceptance. "I'll be less of a burden, so—"

"You aren't a _burden,_ Lucy. Don't be ridiculous." His firm out-firmed her firm. "But you'll be safer. I can't always protect you. Neither can Wyatt." He paused. "Our last mission showed us that."

She looked up at his bleak expression. She would actually put a fairly substantial amount of money on the possibilities that a.) he didn't think he'd earned the right to mourn along with them, b.) he didn't think any of them would believe his sincerity, c.) he'd gotten so used to ignoring his own grief as irrelevant.

She looked down at her own hands. She'd killed two men, so why did the thought of turning her hands into weapons disquiet her so?

"Is it worse when it's with your bare hands?" she asked quietly.

"Yes."

Not the answer that she'd wanted. But she wanted him to have lied to her, even less.

"When I was fifteen," he began abruptly.

She looked up at him.

He eased his tongue over his top lip. "I ran away and joined the resistance." A sidelong glance. "You read that in my file."

She nodded once.

"I was big. I could win any schoolyard fight I got into. And... I could stand up to my father." He looked at his own hands. "After that, I couldn't imagine anything that could—" He hesitated. "I thought I knew what I was getting into."

Pause.

"God," he breathed, both prayer and imprecation. "Was I wrong."

"I threw up after my first battle." He glanced sideways. "Actually, it took me a couple, to... stop doing that."

"I thought... that everything would be different, afterwards. That _I_ would be different." He shook his head. "I was relieved and disappointed." He paused. "This all sounded more helpful in my head."

Lucy couldn't help a quick breath of laughter. "No," she said. "Thank you. You're always... you're always honest with me."

He looked down at her, face soft and solemn. He licked his lips again, and nodded once.

"So," she began. "Once you're out of the sling, we'll..."

He looked at her. "Lucy, I'm not... saying I could take you with one arm behind my back, but..."

"... you're saying that you could take me with one arm behind your back," she finished for him.

He was trying not to smile.

"Fine," she said. "When do we start?"

#

Denise found them a punching bag somewhere. Together, Flynn and Lucy tried to hang it from one of the beams in the barn.

"I took some self-defense classes in college," she told him as they struggled with the heavy bag. Flynn could hoist it one-handed, but he couldn't _attach_ it one-handed, and Lucy was too short to easily reach. "I'm not totally hopeless."

"Good," he said after a minute. "We get this up and we'll start with you showing me what you remember."

They did. About the only redeeming thing was that he didn't laugh at her. Lucy felt her face burn, showing off her frankly pathetic self-defense skills to a highly trained and lethal soldier.

She finished, crossed her arms over her chest, and stared at him defensively.

He took a deep breath. "So we can skip step one, how to make a fist without breaking your fingers. Let's work on your form."

He held the bag steady and had her hit over and over. It was an exercise in humiliation, made worse by how seriously he was taking it.

It felt about a hundred and ten degrees in the barn. Her clothes were clinging to her everywhere. It felt like they were trying to crawl under her epidermis for that extra cling factor. Sweat stung her eyes, and her hair fell into her face. She paused and stepped back, wiping her face with the bottom of her shirt. Her own rough breathing embarrassed her.

Flynn was watching her. "What?" she demanded, barely keeping from snapping as she opened her water canteen.

He just shook his head.

"That policeman in New York City," he said after a minute. "I'm imagining what he would think."

Lucy considered this, her temper abating slightly as she drank. Then she smiled. She put her water down, wiped her face, and started again.

Finally Flynn called a halt. He looked at her with a critical eye. "That's enough for today, I think."

She turned away and concentrated on unwrapping her hands, feeling her face burn. "I don't get to see what you can do? No inspirational training montage after my first session?"

He was quiet for a moment. "You already know what I can do."

Lucy snorted. "Ready to trade me out for a less clumsy historian?" she joked.

He looked at her reproachfully. She subsided.

She looked down at her clothes. "Wow. I've never been this wet without actual _water_ involved."

He nodded at her canteen. "Refill that at least once when you go inside, and drink it all."

"I know." Florida summer was a completely different level of brutal, and potentially sickening, than summer in the Bay Area.

"How's your hand?" he added. He took her right hand in his left one and looked at her knuckles, touching them very lightly with his thumb.

Lucy felt a sudden flush of warmth across her whole body.

"Good," he said, and for one horrifying moment, she thought _that_ was what he was referring to. She blinked at him in quiet alarm.

"If it aches a bit, that's normal."

Normal. Right. All of this was very normal. She was going to— go, now, and have very normal thoughts, and a very normal shower, and God help her she was _not_ thinking about showering when they were both standing here drenched in sweat and, nope. Nope!

She managed to kickstart her synapses in time to mutter, "Thanks, Flynn."

"Any time," he told her seriously. "Tomorrow again?"

She sighed, and nodded.

#

After Jiya made a really stupid mistake, Connor put his foot down and banned her from touching the Lifeboat. He told her to go upstairs and sleep. If she used the simulator, he'd fuss, and she couldn't climb into the Pocket with him there, so she decided to try that whole working in daylight thing again.

She'd been at it about an hour, and had entirely covered the table with her stuff, when Wyatt came out and started making a sandwich. "Hungry?"

She had, for once, fed herself. She pointed to her own empty plate, and gave him a brief smile.

Lucy opened the fridge door as Wyatt was cutting his tall creation in half. Frankly, Jiya didn't think the _width_ was the dimension he needed to worry about fitting in his mouth, but hope sprang eternal when it came to boys and food, apparently.

She pictured Rufus doing the same thing, and felt another disorienting pang of grief/warmth/grief.

The worst part was, the pain was a little less acute than it had been at first. Just a little, but enough for her to tell. Was she _forgetting?_

"Want half?" Wyatt asked Lucy.

Lucy shook her head, smiled politely, and pulled out the big jug of iced tea they always kept in the fridge. Lucy claimed to hate cold coffee, and it was far, far too hot and sticky to drink anything warm.

"Not really hungry," Lucy said. "Too hot."

Except Jiya had seen her consider and then return to the fridge two separate dishes of leftovers.

"Right." Wyatt leaned against the counter and began eating. Lucy poured herself some tea.

Jiya kept working and didn't look up at them. Easier that way, lately. The implication that there was something to see— well, it would make Lucy uncomfortable, and might set Wyatt off.

"... you okay, Lucy?" Wyatt asked.

Jiya ignored her own advice and looked up at them from under her eyelids. Neither of them had moved— but Lucy's body language whispered, _uncomfortable_.

"Fine." Another brief, polite smile. "Just the heat, and, uh... tired." Lucy quickly drained the rest of her tea, washed the glass, and took a few steps towards the door. "I'll, uh, see you later."

"No, you're not."

Lucy stopped, one foot through the far doorway, and turned around.

"I'm insulted that you think I don't know you well enough to be able to tell," Wyatt added.

"Wyatt—"

"You've been pushing me away since Rufus died. I thought we were a team, Lucy."

"No, I—"

"Don't _lie_ to me, Lucy." His voice turned sharp. "I _know_ you."

Lucy looked exhausted. "Wyatt— everything that's happened—"

Jiya could see, if Wyatt could not, the signs of Lucy drawing herself up and bracing for a fight. That was the thing about Lucy. Often she was anxious, self-deprecating, confused, doubting. Soft, in many ways. But her core of steel never seemed to fail her. She was like... like a marshmallow wrapped around rebar.

But Lucy, even when ready for a fight, never sought them out. "It's been a lot, okay, Wyatt? It's a lot to handle."

"So let me help you, Lucy."

"I—" She shook her head and turned away.

"We used to be _friends_." Wyatt's voice had turned urgent. "We were there for each other. And now, with Rufus gone—"

Jiya bit her lip to keep quiet, because it was that or scream at him for dragging Rufus's name into this.

"Wyatt, I _can't_."

That was Lucy striking her colors, lowering the flag, trying to pass unchallenged. _Not worth a battle_.

"It's because of Flynn, isn't it?" Wyatt called after the retreating Lucy.

For the second time, Lucy stopped in the doorway, and turned.

But when Lucy _did_ hit back...

Goaded into replying, Lucy stepped back towards Wyatt. "It has nothing to do with Flynn!"

Wyatt looked skeptical, but also pleased to have finally gotten a real response. Gotten her to engage.

"You _got_ your wife back and you're letting her _go_?" Lucy demanded.

Wyatt looked taken aback. "I'm pretty sure she made her choice clear when she was shooting at us, Lucy!" He stepped forward.

"Yeah, because she was _brainwashed_ by Rittenhouse!"

Jiya abruptly decided she didn't want or need to be here. She grabbed her computer. She shouldn't abandon Lucy, but maybe Lucy would feel less constrained without an audience.

And Jiya was _so damn tired_ of this whole thing—

She ran into something unyielding in the doorway. Her breath left her in a rush. Flynn steadied her and moved her out of his way, all without taking his eyes off the combatants.

Jiya hadn't even noticed him arrive. _Speak of the devil and he will appear_. She was _glad_ Flynn was on their side now— or they were on his side, or whatever. But damn, the man was uncanny sometimes. Had it been hearing his own name that had brought him out? Hearing raised voices triggering his weird protectiveness of Lucy? He didn't, _couldn't_ , believe Wyatt would ever hurt her. Could he? But he was watching intently and expressionless.

To be fair, it was also just a really tiny house.

"They had her since childhood!" Lucy added. "She didn't _have_ a choice, Wyatt!"

"You always have a choice, Lucy." Wyatt sounded sad.

"They probably threatened her parents, if she had second thoughts, or her brother— she was _raised_ as Rittenhouse, Wyatt! That was almost me. That _was_ me, for six weeks. And you're— you're _abandoning_ her." Lucy spat the word out like it was poison.

Wyatt realized too late what he was walking into. "I didn't abandon _you_ , Lucy!"

Lucy gave him a stink-eye, but didn't verbally contest that point. "So what makes Jessica different?" Lucy demanded.

Jiya looked up at Flynn. "Should we be hearing this?" she whispered.

Flynn gestured with exaggerated politeness at the hallway behind him, but didn't otherwise move.

Jiya rolled her eyes. Well, she certainly wasn't leaving the _three_ of them together like this.

"I would—" Wyatt stepped forward and reached for Lucy's arms. Lucy stepped back and ran into the counter. Wyatt dropped his outstretched hands. "Lucy, I would always come for you. _Always_."

"Then what makes her different, Wyatt?" Lucy repeated. "What makes _me_ different from _the woman you took oaths to?_ "

Jiya didn't think Flynn noticed the subtle shift in his own breathing, the slow, quiet breath out. But Jiya did. These last three years, she'd become very good at reading body language, as as survival skill. Knowing when someone was about to snap. Flynn wasn't. That had been a shift of— of appreciation, maybe.

He really liked core-of-steel Lucy, apparently.

" _She left!_ " Wyatt's cracking voice drew Jiya's attention back to the scene in front of them. "She stole the Lifeboat, and _Jiya_ , and went back to _them_. She _chose_ , Lucy, and if— if she came back— I'd spend the rest of my life wondering if she meant it."

Lucy nodded. "Okay. Maybe she chose. But your child didn't. And you're leaving her, him, to be raised into _Rittenhouse_."

Wyatt stared at her. Jiya felt confused, too. She honestly wasn't clear on whether this supposed Logan baby even existed. Maybe no one was.

"To _become_ Rittenhouse," Lucy added. "And no one will come for her, or him, if you _don't_."

Wyatt and Lucy glared at each other. Lucy moved first, leaving out the other kitchen door. Wyatt didn't try to stop her this time. A moment later, they all heard the trapdoor bang.

Wyatt exhaled, his shoulders slumping. He looked up and saw the two of them in the doorway. Jiya gave him an apologetic look. If it was not particularly heartfelt— she _had_ been there first, and he'd known she was there.

Wyatt looked at a point somewhere above her head, and his expression hardened.

Jiya glanced up just in time to see the tail end of a shit-eating smirk leave Flynn's face. God, he really was the worst. Any man with an ounce of compassion, or failing that, basic _self-preservation_ , wouldn't have pushed Wyatt right now. Flynn, apparently, had neither.

Wyatt looked briefly murderous, then stormed out. The back door slammed. Flynn had the gall to look surprised.

Jiya exhaled herself, as the tension in the room dropped by about two degrees of magnitude. Flynn wandered over to the sink, inspected the untouched half of Wyatt's sandwich carefully, then took a bite. He chewed and shrugged, as if to say, _This isn't made to my specifications, and I'll let it slide this time, but don't let it happen again_.

"God, you really are the worst," Jiya told him. "It's like you're doing a PhD in ways of being awful."

Flynn swallowed. "Careful. Someone might overhear and think you're beginning to like me."

Jiya snorted. "I don't think there's any danger of that."

Flynn continued to eat. Jiya continued to watch him. Finally she said, "What are you worried about?" Because it _was_ worry. It was not jealousy— or not that alone _._ "Wyatt's not going to hurt her." Physically, at least.

"Correct. Wyatt is not going to hurt Lucy."

Flynn's slow, precise, deliberate words sent a shiver of unease down Jiya's spine. "I mean— you _know_ I mean— that he would never." God, how did she even have to say this?

"Deliberately?" Flynn said after a minute. "No. But _I would never touch her_ is an insufficient standard." His voice was biting.

Jiya eyed him. The pain in his voice sounded so old it was practically fossilized.

She really didn't want to think about that.

"But let her suffer the effects of his temper because he doesn't bother to control it? He's done it before. To Lucy, and to Jessica."

"Wait." She shook her head. "What?"

"One of their neighbors called the police to report a domestic disturbance in 2014," Flynn said after a minute.

Jiya stared at him, unease deepening. She wanted to believe this was all his fabrication, but he was speaking in the same unemotional tone he used to report historical facts. "What happened?"

"The police report said she was unharmed, and seemed angry rather than afraid, but his hand was bleeding and some drinking glasses were broken on the floor. They both claimed it was an accident."

The _police report_ — "How much did you find out about us when this all started?"

Flynn gave her a Look. Well, Jiya supposed she didn't really want to know. "That wasn't even the same Wyatt," she pointed out. "It never happened for him. Besides, how do you know it _wasn't_ an accident?"

"I think it was."

Jiya didn't understand any of this, and she really didn't want to be having this conversation. "Were the police ever called again?"

"No."

"If it's deliberate... it usually doesn't stop at one," she said. "... I don't need to tell you that, do I."

Flynn's head snapped up.

 _Gah!_ The Flynn who lived and worked with them was— grudgingly— semi-domesticated. No longer the murderous fiend of before, and if a cold-blooded killer, at least for the right side.

The Flynn looking at her now was every bit the lethal soldier of his file. For the first time, she felt genuinely afraid of him, though he'd done nothing more than look up.

She forced herself to stiffen her spine, stay where she was and meet his gaze.

The tension drained out of him much more slowly than it had appeared. He put the empty plate in the stained enamel sink with a _clink_ that had the finality of punctuation. "I cleaned and assembled the Ruger. Do you want to try it?"

"Yes, please."

She shot several dozen rounds in their makeshift range, Flynn constantly correcting and criticizing her aim. Her hands ached from the recoil. Finally he motioned for her to lower the gun. "That's enough for today," he was saying when she tugged off her ear protection. "Congratulations. You're getting closer to being able to hit the _narrow_ side of a barn."

Jiya snorted.

He reached for the gun. But she didn't give it to him. "Flynn."

He looked at her.

"You understand what Wyatt's going through better than the rest of us."

Flynn's face hardened into an implacable mask, an echo of his earlier anger.

Undaunted, Jiya added, "You could help him."

"I'm not interested in _helping_ Wyatt." The sneer of disgust on his face would have been more appropriate if Jiya had suggested he take a crap in the refrigerator.

"Well, maybe you should be. Because if he keeps going like this, who do you think's going to take the brunt of it?"

Flynn stared at her. Jiya stared back. Finally, he took the gun from her, checked the safety, and walked off, leaving her to collect the targets.

"You could at least try not goading him," Jiya called after him. But Flynn's retreating back gave no indication that he was listening.

#

"You can't possibly tell me I'm any good at this," she told Flynn a few days later.

"You're not," he said bluntly, "but you're better than you were when we started."

She sighed quietly. "I guess I'll have to take that."

She'd improved, if that was the right word, to the point that lessons now alternated correcting her form with him calling out a series of strikes. "You're faster than that," he told her, after watching one series critically. "Try again."

She eyed him balefully, and did.

"Again."

She did.

"Better, but this time don't trade off power for speed. You're holding back."

She'd raised her hands, but at this, she stared at him. She lowered her hands, and turned away, disturbed.

He didn't say anything. He was actually an incredibly patient teacher. Sometimes that infuriated her. Sometimes, like now, it was deeply comforting.

"You know, of all people, I should know better," she said quietly. "What I study? I should _know_ that words don't stop fists." She took a drink. "That people don't _work_ like that. Clinging to words over fists doesn't make you noble. It just makes you dead." She wiped her face. "I guess maybe you were right about my naiveté after all."

"Lucy." She heard him step away from the bag. "Why do you think I killed Lieutenant Colonel Travis at the Alamo, if not because of the power of his words?"

 _Ugh_. She hadn't thought about that in a long time, and doing so hurt.

"And why did _you_ go to such lengths to get that letter out, if you didn't believe in that power too?"

She sighed. "I've killed people with a gun, you know," she said quietly. "So this? Not wanting to get my hands dirty? It makes me the worst kind of hypocrite. I'm willing to hide behind you and Wyatt but I won't do it myself."

"Lucy, it _is_ harder, worse, to fight someone with your hands than with a gun. That doesn't make you a hypocrite. It makes you _human_."

She turned to look at him. After a long moment, she said very softly, "I feel like I'm losing something."

"Because you are," he told her, equally quietly.

She looked up at him with a mute plea. She didn't like this. She didn't like who she was becoming. She was _terrified_.

But what right did she have to place that ahead of getting Rufus back? Were these scruples more important to her than Wyatt's life, or Flynn's life, or whoever might die protecting her if she refused to learn how to do it herself?

"You once told me that— you'd walk away from your family..." She didn't want to remind him of that— but—

He nodded.

"I don't—" God, this was craven and not something she should say to him, but she'd started now. "I don't want to have to make that decision."

"Don't flatter yourself, Lucy," he said drily.

His sarcasm startled her. He so rarely used it on— on the vulnerable parts of her. Not any more. She looked away, down at her hands again.

"You have a long way to go before your soul is half as black as mine. You think a few rounds with a punching bag is going to push you over the edge? Please."

Who unironically called their _soul_ black? "Sometimes I think you missed your calling on the stage," she muttered after a minute.

"Considering what a pain in the ass John Wilkes Booth was, I doubt it."

She still—

She was _frightened_ , and uncomfortable, and just maybe— it was okay not to hide that.

She took one step towards him, then two. She didn't know how to ask— but she wanted—

He looked blank, then confused. Then carefully blank again, but he lifted his left arm away from his body with a nonchalance such that it could have just been a gesture... if he'd been wrong about what she wanted.

She leaned against him, and made a quiet noise of relief when he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Her head rested near his heart, and its slow beat was loud in her ear.

"You're still clearly _you_ in the journal, you know." His voice rumbled through his chest. "You don't... it's not _yourself_ that you lose."

_I think I already have._

She stayed where she was, the ache in her chest easing, until the comfort of leaning against him was replaced by an acute and pleasant but _not_ comfortable awareness of his solidity, his smell, all the places they were in contact. And an ache considerably lower than her chest. She swallowed and pulled away. "Thank you, Flynn," she whispered without looking at him.

"Any time, Lucy."

A surge of a different warmth rushed through her, threatening to leave her giddy. She couldn't— he hadn't meant it like that. She had to focus. She turned to the bag again.

"You're shaking," he pointed out. "You sure you wanna keep going?"

She squared up and brought her hands up. "No," she told him bluntly. "But I want to quit even less."

He reached out and steadied the bag for her.

#

"Flynn."

A pause. "Mmm."

Lucy hesitated. "If someone goes back and changes the timeline... you don't notice. You never notice."

His silence seemed to ask, _why exactly are we talking about this now?_

"If you— if we— can find the right thing to change to save your family... Someone else could go back and do it and you'd be back with them."

Another pause. Then she heard him sit up. He turned the little lamp on, and they faced each other across the small bedroom.

"How long have you been thinking about this?" he asked.

She looked at him steadily. "Since they followed me to our meeting and took from you the chance you should have had."

He grimaced. As if he thought, _you have the nerve to mention_ that?

Yes. She did.

"Rittenhouse... captured me right after that." She paused. He didn't react. _Did you know, then, I was cooperating with your enemy?_ "I thought... I thought everyone else was dead. I had a lot of time to think about how I might make things, uh... turn out better for someone else."

He watched her for a long moment, the pain she hadn't seen in a while visible.

Lucy couldn't be sure you didn't _notice_. Was it that yourself before the change— more or less died? Instantly, never to be recovered?

 _Amy_ —

She swallowed.

Or did the Time Team simply return to yet another branch of reality? Had she always lived in the world where, for example, Rittenhouse was going to save Jessica's brother? Were all the realities _she_ could never again access still out there somewhere, somehow?

 _Amy_ —

"I'd thought of that," Flynn said.

Lucy waited.

"But there was never anyone who would—"

"I would," Lucy said quietly, when he didn't continue. "Jiya would take me. Even Wyatt would help if you asked him."

Flynn looked at her with skepticism and pity. "Would you kill someone?"

Lucy hesitated for a long time. "It depends on who. Why." Which—

She almost expected disgust for those scruples, after everything he'd done. But he just gave her an indecipherable look.

"I don't deserve that," he said. "After what I've done."

"Flynn, you never would have done any of it."

"I know. But I've done it now. I don't deserve to have that wiped clean."

"Flynn, you wouldn't _know_."

"I _know_." His voice had an angry edge. Angry, and maybe... scared. "Besides. If I never go after Rittenhouse... does any of this happen? How does that work?"

Lucy hesitated. She didn't know. Connor, maybe, or Rufus would know. Would have known. But— if she never went back to give Flynn the journal— that she'd already given him— would they be shunted into another timeline?

"You might come back to a world where Rittenhouse won. Where no one ever fought them. And I won't—" His voice had dropped to a whisper. He looked down at his hands. "Risk that."

"What did you offer Wyatt to get him to go after Benedict Arnold?" Lucy asked after a minute.

His turn to frown at her. "I didn't have to offer him anything. You and Rufus persuaded him."

It gave Lucy a headache, thinking she could sit between Wyatt and Flynn and they would each swear to a different version of reality. Well, they rarely saw eye to eye, but this time they'd both, objectively, be right.

"At Watergate you read Wyatt what you said were excerpts from the journal, taunting him about Jessica's death," she said quietly.

Flynn looked neither surprised nor remorseful.

"You promised him the name of his wife's killer to get his cooperation in 1780. After the World's Fair, you called him and told him the name was Wes Gilliam. After we tracked you across Missouri, he stole the Lifeboat and went back to make sure Wes Gilliam was never born. That's why he wasn't with us in Paris."

"It was just you and Rufus?" Flynn sounded skeptical.

She shook her head. "We had another soldier with us. Karl killed him. Master Sergeant Baumgardner. That's why Wyatt and I were both surprised when Denise said he was alive."

Flynn took this in stride, just another death. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"I guess... it's hard to process that I'm sitting talking to a different version of you than in 1972, that's all." Well, Flynn had been dealing with that feeling since the Hindenburg. _Would_ he ever meet that version of her again, the one from São Paulo?

"Even though both Benedict Arnold _and_ Watergate happened before Rittenhouse saved Jessica's brother. But after we left the present to go back to—" She shook her head. This was a mess.

"Okay. So you don't remember. And you _wouldn't_ remember."

Flynn just looked at her. "Do you have any idea how many people I've killed, or been willing to kill, or sent to their deaths, in this fight, Lucy?"

She tilted her chin. "Yes, actually, I do."

"The guards at Mason Industries," he said. "A man in 1937 who got in my way. The crew and passengers of the Hindenburg. An engineer in 1865. Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, Vice President Johnson, Secretary Seward. Whoever the Nazis sent to their deaths with the money I gave them. Lieutenant Colonel Travis. All the women and children in the Alamo—"

"We got them out."

"I know. When Santa Ana decided— all I could do was hope you would. Somehow." His voice and expression were as bleak as she'd ever heard and seen them. "Where was I? Two White House guards in 1972. A NASA worker who took the time to tell us everything we needed to know to get in. A plumber. Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. Austin Roe. John Rittenhouse. The Ford brothers. Seven Missouri— you must have seen them."

"We buried them." This cool, emotionless litany was horrifying, but Lucy refused to look away.

He sat up a little straighter. "Anthony. Your soldier, apparently. Eliot Ness. Rufus. And then... you and Wyatt." He swallowed. "And that's not counting anyone who actually belonged to Rittenhouse. They deserved it." He sat back and fixed his eyes on her face. "Look me in the eye, Lucy, and tell me I deserve to have any of that undone."

She looked him in the eye. "You deserve to have Lorena and Iris back."

He sprang to his feet and paced to the wall and back, disarranging his hair. He looked down at her. "Maybe you're not the person I thought you were, Lucy."

She looked up, _up_ , at him. "We've established that you've been wrong about me on a number of counts," she said evenly.

Arrested, he stopped, then gingerly sank down on the very edge of the cot.

"Just think about it," she told him quietly. "I'd help you."

"I won't let you get your hands dirty for me, Lucy." His voice was very low in volume, but had all the softness of steel.

"No. But maybe there's another way."

"You say that a lot."

"Yeah, and I'm often _right_." She leaned forward. "How many times did you try to coerce me into doing something awful for you, back when we were fighting each other? And how many times did that go well for you, and how many times did it end with you getting your ass kicked?"

He stared at her, but couldn't keep his face straight. His expression fractured into a wry grin. "Perhaps you have a point."

"I definitely have a point."

They stared at each other. They were so close, in the intimacy of the dimness. She became aware of physical nearness in more ways than one. She could smell the faint smell of laundry detergent on his clothes, and felt sure he could hear her heart hammering.

 _And I was just telling him how he deserves his wife back_. Lucy forced herself to straighten up, unable to escape the way his face fell a little. _You can't have it both ways, Lucy. Remember where that got Wyatt?_ "I, uh, it was a long day—"

"Right." He stood immediately, went back to his own side, and turned off the light. "Good night, Lucy," he said amid the creaking of the bed.

She curled up under her light sheet. "Good night, Garcia."

#

Jiya had never really had to _think_ about what the 4 th of July really meant to soldiers. Now she was celebrating it with two of them... well, for some values of "celebrating."

They were sitting around a sulky bonfire at dusk. Wyatt insisted the smoke would keep away the mosquitoes, but probably he'd just stopped noticing the bites, because she was getting bit plenty.

She really should be inside in the simulator, since she was too exhausted to get anywhere with the Time Warp. But she just couldn't force herself to do that right now.

Firecrackers had been going off all day. Now larger fireworks began to add their deeper percussive _thud_ s. The house was on high enough ground that some of the sparkles were visible in the sky. Wyatt and Flynn didn't _flinch_ , and Jiya— well, she wasn't a psychologist, she wasn't going to venture a guess either way about PTSD signs. But clearly neither of them appreciated the cognitive load of the instinctive cycle each explosion produced: _an attack? No. Relax. An attack? No. Relax. An attack...?_

Probably some of the people shooting those things off would _swear_ they were showing their patriotism and their "support for the troops." Funny, that.

What a strange group they were for this holiday. Connor and Flynn were immigrants... well, Connor was. Flynn was, as usual, not entirely characterizable. Jiya's parents were immigrants. And Lucy was... the heir to a dynasty convinced they were the rightful rulers of the country.

The immigrants thing, maybe that actually made them the perfect group for this celebration. Melting pot, etc, even if that had always been more ideal than reality. The Rittenhouse thing? Not so much.

Wyatt slumped a little lower in his decrepit lawn chair, already halfway through his second beer. Flynn shifted uncomfortably, maybe because he'd finally stopped wearing that sling. Lucy was staring into the fire, looking like her mind was a million miles away.

The not-talking stretched out, punctuated by the snap of the fire, the exuberant chorus of crickets and frogs, the whine of mosquitoes, and the boom of fireworks.

Could she go inside without seeming rude?

"So, Jiya," Connor said, brightly and awkwardly. "Any 4th of July traditions in your family?"

Jiya looked at him. "No."

They lapsed back into quiet.

"My parents took us to the municipal fireworks every year." Lucy still didn't take her eyes off the fire. "Before that my dad would shut himself in the den and read the Declaration of Independence." She paused. "He had to shut himself in the den because otherwise my mother would offer about three hundred and seventeen annotations."

Wyatt snorted. "Like mother, like daughter." He glanced up and seemed to realize what he'd just said. "In the, uh, good ways, anyway."

"I guess we did have one tradition," Jiya said after a while. "Every year, my dad would rant about how ridiculous the fireworks were, and my mom and I would sneak up to the roof to watch them."

"Is complaining about ungrateful former colonists a tradition?" Connor asked after another pause.

Wyatt scoffed. "No."

"Well, thank God this didn't _become_ a tradition, but I did have two employees programming late one 4 th who became convinced they could turn fireworks into a jetpack."

Jiya's turn to snort. "Rufus still had the scars." Then she thought through the grammatical implications, and her amusement faded.

Wyatt looked over at Flynn. "Any traditions from the American side of your family?" He asked it with a palpable air of tolerance.

"No."

The olive branch, extended, dropped unnoticed to the ground. Wyatt gave Lucy a look that managed to be both sour and self-righteous. Lucy wasn't looking at him.

"There's, uh, ice cream in there," Jiya said after a while.

Connor looked up. "How? Agent Christopher's not here, and it would have melted on foot."

"It's been hidden behind the ground beef."

"Ah. No braving of the hordes who've managed to turn your country's flag into a truly remarkable assortment of garments, then."

Wyatt looked up. "They're being patriotic."

"It's against the flag code." Lucy was still staring into the fire.

Wyatt made another scoffing noise. "Oh, come on, Lucy. Not everyone grow up in the upper echelons of Bay Area society with a historian mother to tell them every nuance—"

"Does it take that much _nuance_ to figure out that if you're using the flag to cover your ass, you're doing it wrong?" Lucy demanded.

Flynn snorted. Loudly.

Wyatt glanced at him, irritated, then back to his main antagonist. "They mean well. And last time I checked, you're not the arbiter of what's an appropriate display of someone's devotion to their country, _Doctor_ Preston."

"No, I'm not. That's why we _have the flag code_."

"That code is _guidelines_ —"

Jiya went inside. Her shoulders dropped in relief when their voices faded. Peaceful silence... except for the fireworks, the frogs, and the crickets. But those last two sounded nice.

She ate standing over the kitchen sink. She'd discharged any housemate-related obligations to the rest of the team by telling them the ice cream existed. If they chose to stay outside and argue until it was all gone, that was their problem.

Flynn appeared as she was halfway through her first bowl. "Are they still going at it?" she asked.

He nodded once, then scooped himself a heaping serving of mint chocolate chip.

"I'm surprised you don't hide this downstairs," he said after a couple of bites.

She shook her head. "The freezer part of that little fridge doesn't keep it cold enough."

"Ah, the voice of experience."

A new set of fireworks began to go off. Higher, but still partially obscured by the trees. Jiya glanced at the clock: nine exactly. These were probably from the nearest town, then.

"They are pretty," she admitted wistfully. "I wish there was somewhere to see them clearly." In this sub-tropical... _place_ , she certainly wasn't climbing a tree in the dark.

Flynn grunted. She looked at him. He'd prowled the property extensively. "Do you know somewhere?"

His put-upon look told her the answer was yes. "You can't take your ice cream," he said after a minute, washing his own bowl.

Wait. How the _hell_ had he put all that away that fast?

Boys.

"Is it far?"

"About five minutes, but you need your hands free."

She searched the cupboards until she triumphantly pulled out the smallest of their canteens, which also had a strap. He watched, amused, as she packed it with ice cream, secured the cap tightly, and slung it across her body. "Lead on."

She expected him to head down the hill towards the creek. The road was in that direction, meaning a gap in the trees, and the path could be treacherous, explaining his comment about her hands. Instead, he walked into the barn and took out a flashlight.

"Put your foot on this half-wall." He pointed with the beam of light. "Then pull yourself up to the support beam, follow it to the wall. Use that crack in the wood as a foothold to get up to the window. Go through the window, turn, pull yourself up to the eaves." He snapped off the light. "I'll go first."

Watching in the moonlight, she didn't think his feet actually _touched_ all the places he'd indicated. He stepped up to the half-wall, then was suddenly at the end of the barn, then scaling the wall with a grace she hadn't expected in someone his size.

Or someone who'd recently taken a bullet to the chest, for that matter.

"See?" His voice floated down from the window. "Easy."

 _Easy if you're six foot a billion_ , Jiya thought darkly a moment later. She'd pulled herself up to the support beam, panting, and walked the narrow wood to the wall. Now she was most of the way up that wall, her foot wedged in the chink, struggling to reach the window.

She inched her left foot upward. Was there another foothold?

She grabbed the edge of the window. "Nggggh!" Her arms burning, at one point threatening to quit altogether, she hauled herself up.

She twisted awkwardly, pushed herself out, grabbed the edge of the roof with one hand, and put her feet in the window. She got her other hand flat on the roof. Damn it, she wasn't sure she had another haul like that in her. But—

She walked her feet up the side of the building, uncomfortably aware of how much faith she was placing in the tread of her old sneakers. Her feet braced, she pushed, got her torso over the edge, heaved herself up on her hands, got a leg over, and scrambled the rest of the way up. She collapsed on her butt, panting.

Flynn had the damn gall to look surprised. "I'm sorry, was that difficult for you?"

She glared at him. He'd known how to get up here, which meant— "How the hell did you made this climb with one _arm_?"

He didn't answer.

She scooted awkwardly closer. When he gave her a _what is this, now?_ Look, she realized he'd probably moved to that spot on purpose. She stopped.

"This is a nice view," she admitted. She could see the fireworks, and a lot else. She opened her ice cream canteen, and—

Realized she didn't have anything to eat it with.

Flynn smirked at her. _Of course_ he'd noticed in the kitchen. _Go sit under a bridge, you damn troll_.

With as much dignity as she could muster, she raised the canteen to her lips and drank what had melted. In this heat, she'd soon have a milkshake, anyway.

The fireworks were beautiful, the colors and shapes playing out against the dark sky. Silver streamers ran down against the darkness, then a red ring burst into being and rapidly expanded, then a blue ring.

_You know, the nu-spliced version of Return of the Jedi has fireworks at the end. I should tell Rufus—_

Shit.

Well. Once she got him back, _which she would_ , they'd watch the damn fireworks together and she'd share her crazy fan theories.

Her eyes prickled. She didn't fight that. That was okay, right now. Trying to ignore her grief was like pretending Rufus hadn't mattered at all. In a way.

With uncharacteristic but somehow unsurprising tact, Flynn didn't comment about her not-very-surreptitious wiping of her eyes. She sniffled through the next few minutes of the fireworks—

He made an exasperated noise and held something out in her direction. A handkerchief? "Blow your nose and be done with it. You sound like my—"

He cut himself off suddenly.

Jiya took the thing, blew her nose, stuck the handkerchief in her pocket to wash later, and then realized that the best revenge for this climb would have been to sit here and sniffle loudly the whole time. Oh, well.

The fireworks wound down with a grand finale that made her smile despite everything. Damn it, Rittenhouse had taken enough from her. She would get Rufus back and she would make Emma pay. But she wouldn't let them take her enjoyment of the small pleasures left to her. Wouldn't let them turn her into a grim revenge automaton—

She snuck a glance at Flynn.

But, he, actually... well, she didn't know him well, and she was okay with that. But from what she'd seen... Garcia Flynn was fumbling his way, improbably, _somehow_ , towards peace.

Jiya stood, uncomfortable at another moment of— understanding, kinship— and walked up to the peak of the roof. Below, Connor and Lucy were still at their little fire pit behind the house, but Wyatt was gone.

"I'm going to climb down now."

Flynn looked at her blankly. _And you're announcing this because...?_

"Thanks for showing me, uh... your? this? spot."

Flynn grunted. "Once you're at the window," he said after a minute. "You should be able to dangle from the edge and drop safely to the ground. It's not that far."

"Noted."

#

Five hours later, she came up to pee, and found Wyatt sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and his gun. He'd clearly been there a while.

_What?_

He looked up, concluded she wasn't trying to get his attention, and looked away. "I don't like the fireworks," he muttered.

Sure, they all knew Wyatt had been drinking. But never in the common spaces. And never in the common spaces with his _gun_. What the _hell?_

He looked up again, raising his eyebrows, encouraging her to take what she needed and move on.

And just, what, leave him there? What the hell was he doing with his _gun_? If she walked away— but she absolutely wasn't staying here all night in case he—

She was so tired of this. As she passed the table, she picked up his gun.

She heard him grab and miss. "What the _hell_ , Jiya?"

She kept it in front of her, shrugged off his grasp on her other wrist, and made sure it was safetied. "You can have it back in the morning."

He grabbed her wrist again, almost pulling her to a stop. She yanked free with more force this time, and a warning backwards look. "Don't."

His confusion was turning quickly to anger as they reached the living room. "Jiya, give me my damn _gun!_ "

"So you can do what?"

"Keep you all _safe!_ "

"You don't need a bottle of whiskey for that."

He didn't try to directly grab her again, but he reached for the gun. She held it behind her and sidestepped—

Flynn stepped into the living room, his own gun ready. He lowered it immediately when he saw them, but his expression did not lighten.

Lucy was right behind him. "What's—"

Anger flared in Wyatt's face at the sight of them. He lunged. "This is all _your_ fault!"

Flynn handed his gun off to Lucy, who nearly dropped it. Then Wyatt was on him, and Flynn's caution in getting his weapon out of the way seemed to fuel to the fire of his rage. He struck repeatedly towards Flynn's weak right side, forcing the older man towards the wall.

Connor ran down the stairs holding a large wrench. He stared at the two in confusion, and lowered the wrench... mostly. At the same moment, Lucy shoved Flynn's gun towards Jiya, and waded in. Wyatt started to shove her aside, stopped, and tried to pull himself out of her reach. But she followed and hung on with a grim, old look Jiya had never seen on her face before, trying to drag him backwards off of Flynn.

Jiya was so very, _very_ done.

She pointed Wyatt's gun at the front door and took the safety off. The _click_ wasn't loud, but Wyatt and Flynn were both primed by their profession to notice it.

Everyone froze.

"This is your captain speaking," Jiya said into the sudden silence. "Knock this the _hell_ off."

Wyatt turned. Lucy half-turned, and Flynn straightened up and shook himself a little.

"You've got to pull your head out of your ass," she told Wyatt.

His chin lowered. He gave her a hard stare.

"And out of the bottle. We need you too much."

"I know—"

"No, _you don't!_ You're acting like your pain is unique! Like none of us could possibly understand!"

"You _don't_ —"

"Oh, _really?_ " Her voice was well and raised now. "What part don't we understand? Look around this _damned_ _room_ , Wyatt. You are not the only one who lost Rufus. We all lost him." Her voice cracked. _I shouldn't have to_ tell _you this, damn it._ She barreled on before anyone could interrupt her with sympathy. "You're not the only one who's lost a— a lover in this fight. Flynn has. And I have." In Chinatown, she'd had to either cultivate toughness, or die. She drew on that toughness now to keep going. "You're not the only one to find out someone you love is Rittenhouse. Lucy has. And I hope to God this doesn't happen to you, but you wouldn't even be the first to lose a child in this fight."

Slowly, Flynn looked up from under lowered lids.

"I messed up—"

"Join the club," Jiya snapped. "You're also not the first one to fuck up, make a bad decision, and hand Rittenhouse the advantage. Flynn has."

Flynn and Wyatt had even more in common than she'd previously realized. Was that why they loathed each other so intensely?

"We all have, to some extent. Hell," she added, "this whole thing started because Connor took their money."

"I can't just—"

"I'm not _asking_ you to suck it up. I'm _telling_ you to lose this hostility to the rest of us, because you think we couldn't possibly understand. Because you think it's our fault somehow."

"It's not—"

"We can't afford to have you brooding like this! Grieving? Sure. Join the therapy circle. But not—" She started to gesture at him comprehensively, remembered she was still holding Flynn's gun in that hand, and stopped. "But not _this._ This? This ends."

Wyatt stared at her, every inch the pigheaded, self-righteous idiot. She stared back.

Her eyes began to burn. She'd need to blink soon.

Wyatt looked down. "Right," he muttered. "Sure."

She could tell just from his tone that he wasn't swayed. She'd made things worse, not better. Freshly angry, she turned to Flynn. "And stop baiting him."

Flynn opened his mouth.

"I _don't care. Stop_."

Flynn closed his mouth. He'd be even harder to stare down than Wyatt. Somewhere, the more reasonable parts of her brain told her it was a bad idea to piss off their two soldiers, but her anger was still in the driver's seat.

Flynn gave her a single nod.

Jiya lowered Wyatt's gun. Everyone was still staring at her.

Um, so.

"That's it," she told them. "Unless anyone else wants to introduce something?"

No one moved.

"Our guns?" Flynn asked.

"Oh." Jiya looked down, and awkwardly turned them so they still pointed at the floor but she could offer them butt-first. Each man took his, and automatically checked the safety.

Lucy stared at Wyatt with a bitter, exhausted expression, but by the time he looked up, she'd looked away, towards Flynn.

Wyatt stared at the two of them, smoldering silently. Then he looked at Jiya. His lips tightened. He left out the front door without another word.

"Are you all right?" Lucy asked her.

"I'm fine."

Lucy looked doubtful.

"Really. Go back to bed."

After a minute, Flynn gestured politely for Lucy to precede him, followed her into their room, and shut the door.

Jiya slumped, feeling like her strings had been cut.

Connor laid the wrench down along the baseboard and stepped forward. "I'd offer you some brandy, but that sounds like it would be, ah, topically inappropriate."

"Make it tea and I'll accept." Her eyes were prickling ominously. She fled downstairs. By the time Connor brought two steaming mugs down, she mostly had herself under control, though she was still snuffling and tearing up.

"That was well done." Connor handed her a mug.

She smiled wanly. "It made _me_ feel better, but it made the situation worse."

 _Happy birthday to me_ , she thought bleakly. It was next week. Her first in the 21st century in 3 years. How did you even handle that? Rufus would have made some crack about it. But he was gone, and instead she had a powder keg of a team.

"We're falling apart and Rittenhouse didn't have to fire a shot," she said.

"They fired quite a few," Connor said drily.

"I mean— besides those."

"Wait and see," Connor said. "It's two am, Jiya. Nothing ever looks good then. Go to bed, and see how things are in the morning, hmm? I have something to keep Wyatt busy over the next few days. Try to get him to get his shit together."

She snorted, but didn't otherwise comment.

"You know..." He looked down at his mug, then up. "I've been where he is. Grieving something you feel responsible for. Feeling like you haven't... _earned_ the right to ask for, to _need_ , any... help. Comfort."

"Connor, that's not— you weren't—"

"I was," he said quietly, but firmly enough that she stopped. "I didn't set those explosives, just like Wyatt didn't pull the trigger. But I made the decision that let Rittenhouse in. Just like... he did."

She wasn't sure what to say to that. Maybe... maybe Flynn _wasn't_ the one she should've asked to talk to Wyatt.

"None of us are very good at asking for help, are we?" she said after a minute.

"I have noticed that a time or two. Or seventeen."

She fidgeted with her mug. "On that note, do you think I could have a hug?"

His expression went startled and soft at the same time. "Of _course_." He put down his tea, waited for her to do the same, and then hugged her tightly.

Jiya quickly blinked away tears, though when they pulled apart, she had to roughly wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. "I had to— to survive, um... I mean, I had friends, but no one was going to save me if I didn't. I guess I've just been— been frustrated with all of you, that I had to become so independent, and then I come back here and, oddly enough, no one else had to go through three years of growth, you know?"

"I know. Well, no, I don't know," he admitted. "But I can imagine."

She drank more tea. "I guess I should fire up the simulator."

Connor stared at her in disbelief. "Go to bed."

"I... am tired," she admitted. "But— there's so much to do—"

"When was the last time you got more than four hours of sleep?"

She considered. "A hundred and twenty-five years ago?"

"Go to _bed_. The work'll be here in the morning—"

"— that's what I'm afraid of," she muttered.

"— and you'll be the better for the sleep."

"You know, you're not my boss any more," she pointed out as she grudgingly got to her feet.

"No, but after living with you this long I do know all your passwords."

"You do not."

"AmbassadressAmanda35813? Damn underscore you underscore segfault? CodeWarrioress—"

She looked at him in horror, then grabbed her laptop and fled upstairs. She only slept after she'd changed _all of them_.


	3. Green to Yellow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: this chapter contains ableism and mild body horror. See the end notes for a more detailed, spoiler-y warning.

Jiya woke to sunlight streaming past the dusty mini-blinds. That was unusual enough. Then the quiet of the house told her that she'd not only slept _until_ the morning bathroom rush, she'd slept _through_ it.

Her hair felt greasy. She couldn't remember the last time she'd showered. Oops. So she did, and then shuffled out to the kitchen for a solid breakfast, probably her only real meal of the day.

On her second trip to the fridge, she saw the bottles of liquor on top. Those were new, right? She definitely would've noticed those before? On the other hand, the first time she'd opened the fridge she'd completely missed the six-packs inside, so.

When Wyatt came through the other door, he hesitated, then eyed her. She didn't bother to tell him he was safe. As of two am, she'd already used up her week's quota of Wyatt-related emotional energy. Maybe her month's.

"I'm... sorry."

She looked up at him.

"For scaring you last night. And..." He grimaced. "That you had to say what you did. You have enough to worry about already."

Was it bad that her strongest emotion was relief that she didn't have to patiently give him a line-by-line accounting of where he'd gone wrong?

She took her time chewing. "Thank you," she said finally.

"I, uh... called Agent Christopher this morning. Told her what happened."

He  _had?_ She definitely hadn't expected that. Except, if Wyatt told her himself— first impressions mattered, even to someone as levelheaded as Denise.

When had Jiya become so cynical?

"I asked her..." Wyatt avoided eye contact. "Asked her to find someone— uh." He swallowed and tried again. "For me to talk to," he blurted out in a hurry. "Over, you know, Skype or something."

He  _had_ been busy this morning. How would this change of heart look in, say, a week?

Tiredly, she wondered, again, when she'd become this hard, suspicious person. "That's, uh, good."

"Look, we all trust you, I trust you, to pilot the Lifeboat," he said after a minute. "And you trust me to protect you. To— to  _try_ ."

Jiya was almost too tired to feel, but the look on his face at that little amendment was heartbreaking.

"So, you walking off with my gun, y'know... it feels like you saying you don't."

" _Wyatt_ —" She sat up straighter, then stood.

He raised both hands. "Just thought I owed you an explanation."

"I mean, no," she said after a minute. "I  _don't_ particularly trust you staring at your gun and drinking straight from the bottle."

He winced. "I just..." He hesitated. "Fireworks aren't my favorite thing, okay?"

She looked at him.

"Look, it's not an excuse, none of this is an excuse. I'm just saying, if it makes you feel better... it didn't come out of nowhere."

She considered this. She considered how, after that fruitless stay in the hospital trying to figure out her seizures, she'd gone home and taken three showers in four hours, trying to wash off that hospital smell that  _viscerally_ reminded her of Dad dying. "I get that."

Wyatt relaxed a bit. "So, Flynn's teaching you to shoot?" he asked after a minute.

She nodded.

"If you want to try with another gun, I can... we can do that."

She eyed him.

"Hey, I'm not going to pretend I suddenly like the man. But he's a good soldier. He'll teach you well." It seemed to cost Wyatt something to say that. "But we just have different training. I know some things he doesn't."

"And vice versa?"

He smiled for the first time in days, an echo of his old, cocky expression. "Let's not get carried away here."

She rolled her eyes.

After he left, she washed her dishes and plunged into the Pit of Despair. She came up late afternoon to use the bathroom and refill her water. Nothing tanked her productivity like getting dehydrated, becoming cranky and headachey, and taking half an hour to figure out why.

On her way back to the trapdoor, she noticed Wyatt and Flynn enter the kitchen together without open enmity— unusual— and Lucy standing at the stove. Even more unusual.

Jiya wasn't the only one who thought so. "What are you, uh, doing, Lucy?" Wyatt asked.

"Dinner." Lucy didn't look up. She had some recipe open on her laptop.

Wyatt glanced at Flynn, but got no help there, only a faintly amused look. "I didn't know you could cook," Wyatt said carefully.

"There's a first time for everything." She measured some rice and dumped it into the pot.

Wyatt looked... concerned.

"A while ago Connor said we were all doing our best, but that's not true," Lucy added after a minute. "I'm not doing— enough. So— I can learn this. And at least I'll be less of a menace here than in the Lifeboat."

Wyatt winced, but did not actually disagree.

Jiya felt guilty enough that she did: "You're not—"

Lucy cut her off. "I've seen the looks you and Connor give each other."

"Reading off diagnostics might not seem like work," Jiya told her, "but without someone to do it I have to crawl out from under the Lifeboat every time I try a change. I don't have the time or the patience."

Lucy made an  _I'll-buy-that_ face, but said, "We still need to eat."

"Yeah," Wyatt said. "But..."

Flynn's look of amusement deepened.

"I'm not insulted that you think I can't cook, Wyatt. But I can _learn_. Do you think I got my PhD by rote memorization and copying other people's tricks?"

"Fair enough," Wyatt said after a minute.

"I am actually about to start diagnostics," Jiya said. "Since Lucy's busy, Flynn, Wyatt?"

"Flynn," Connor said, coming in the back door. "I have plans for Wyatt."

Neither man looked overjoyed, but neither argued. So Jiya and Flynn descended the ladder, Flynn as disgustingly deft as always, despite his still-healing injury.

Flynn stopped at the bottom. "I apologize," he said, a little awkwardly. "You asked for help. I didn't give it."

She shrugged. "I honestly don't know if your intervention would have helped or hurt."

"Neither do I, but I'm not going to pretend  _that_ was the deciding factor."

"Let's, uh," Jiya said after a minute, and they got to work, neither of them anxious to draw out that moment.

#

Why wasn't fucking up like getting malaria, or something? Once you'd done it enough it didn't feel so bad?

So far that morning he'd nursed an unforgiving hangover, had a teeth-grittingly humiliating phone call with Agent Christopher, and apologized to Jiya, who'd looked at him like he was an annoying bug she wanted to swat.

God.

Admittedly, as far as his epic fuck-ups went, it wasn't as bad as leaving his wife to be murdered by a serial killer,  _but that was a low bar_ . 

Not even as bad as letting an evil doppelgänger of that same wife into their secret bunker so she could steal their time machine, kidnap their pilot, and eventually lead to the death of one of his closest friends. But, again. He'd really like some higher standards here.

Damage control. He was great at that. Or, at least... he'd been doing it a long time.

He'd talked to Jiya, he'd talked to Agent Christopher. Lucy—

Well.

He wasn't even going there right now. Besides, she and Mason were the two people in this place he  _hadn't_ specifically gone after last night.

Which, unfortunately, still left... one.

Seriously, fuck him.

Wyatt found the pain in the ass in question in the kitchen. He hesitated in the doorway. Flynn had to know he was there, but didn't look up from the sink.

"Flynn."

Flynn turned, and gave him a look that suggested contempt would be a waste of Flynn's energy.

Wyatt hesitated again, but there was nothing for it. "I maybe gave you too much credit last night," he said. "It's not  _all_ your fault."

Flynn raised one supercilious eyebrow. "Is that an apology, Wyatt?"

Wyatt nearly choked on it. "Yes," he managed. "I'm... sorry."

"Fine."

Wyatt fumbled for more conciliatory words. He came up  _way_ short. He did manage not to say  _fuck you and the horse you rode in on_ .

"Was there, ah, something else?" Flynn asked after a minute.

_Fuck you and the_ — Wyatt turned. Over, done, move on.

"You know," Flynn drawled. "You really are remarkable."

Wyatt stopped. Considered just walking away, except Flynn would likely yell the rest after him. Considered strangling him, but he'd already tried that last night, and look where it had gotten him. "Really," he gritted out.

"People who hate themselves as much as you do don't normally live as long as you have."

Wyatt whirled and stared at the back of Flynn's head, a fury roaring in his ears. He really,  _really_ should have, long ago, stopped being surprised by  _anything_ this asshole had the gall to do or  _say_ —

"Either you really are a sociopath, or you don't have any room to talk," he managed to get out. Because he knew what Flynn had done. How could anyone  _not_ hate themselves after that?

"Take your pick," Flynn agreed easily.

"Fine," burst out of Wyatt after a moment, startling him. But he'd already humiliated himself in front of this man, he didn't honestly think it could get worse, and he had this horrible sinking feeling that the bastard saw right through him anyway— "Fine. How are you fucking doing it, Flynn? Because—" He found himself stepping forward. "Because they  _slaughtered_ your wife and your kid. Don't tell me you haven't dreamt that night over and over and  _over_ again, planning out  _everything_ you could have done differently."

Flynn had gone quite still. Wyatt braced himself for— whatever. He turned, and his face was set with deep lines. But his expression was unusually... non-contemptuous.

"Because there were eight of them," he said. "There was never any chance."

... Christ. Wyatt swallowed. He'd seen Flynn fight. For  _him_ to say there was never any chance—

"And because I learned a long time ago to distinguish what I could and couldn't control," Flynn added.

"Really," Wyatt said. "Because I seem to remember chasing you through time while you tried to change  _history_ ."

Flynn shrugged, unrepentant. "It worked. Therefore, it was something I could control."

"Great," Wyatt said after another pause. "Fine."  _Good talk. Let's never do this again_ .

"Jiya's right, you know," Flynn said. "Against Emma? We can't spare anyone. So you get your head out of that damned bottle."

"Thanks for the completely unsolicited advice, Flynn." Wyatt could feel his temper stretching.

"Unless you want to be just another generation of Logans that screws things up in an alcoholic haze."

That dull roaring was back, but  _alcoholic_ wasn't the right word here. Try  _furious_ . Wyatt felt like the anger would split his skin. "What did you say?" he managed, taking two steps into the kitchen.

"What, you think I didn't do my research on all of you?"

"I am  _not_ —" Wyatt ground out.

_My father_ .

Flynn raised his eyebrows, and watched him.

The man's calm was infuriating. Wyatt wanted to make him lose that fucking cool, wanted to see him rage and scream—

to be as angry as Wyatt was.

 _Walk away. Just_ walk away _._

So he did.

He seethed as he cut through the scrub, heading away from the house. But anger was an old, old familiar companion of his. He'd learned long ago how to let it bleed slowly away. As he walked, skirting stands of sharp-edged saw palmetto, he started to cool off.

Garcia fucking Flynn had a unique  _fucking_ ability to get under Wyatt's skin, but that didn't mean Wyatt had to indulge the jackass. He couldn't make Flynn angry? Fine. He could do the next best thing— maybe the best thing  _anyway_ — and not let the dick bait him.

Damn him anyway.

Damn him for being  _right_ . Wyatt was too tired, too used up, to pretend otherwise. He knew self-loathing had put this vicious edge on his anger. He knew his hair-trigger temper when it came to Flynn was partly to distract the others from how badly he himself had fucked up.

Eventually, he reached the fence and started walking the perimeter of the property. He hadn't done it in a while. Always good to know the area, considering it looked like they'd be there for a while.

_Another generation of Logans that fucks things up in an alcoholic haze_ . 

He slammed his foot into a log, which was much harder than it looked, so his fit of temper only hurt his toes. Maybe he shouldn't have been so quick to rule out strangling Flynn—

No.

No.

He stalked through the woods along the fence. When the fence reached the creek, he turned and followed the creek, to where it intersected the path back to the house. He sat down on the big flat rock— someone'd gone to a lot of trouble to haul that thing down here, because it didn't look like any rock nearby— and stared at the water.

It was a blackwater creek, stained brown from the leaves. But right at this spot, across the water, a spring formed a clear pool before spilling into the creek. He had to admit it looked pretty cool. Probably why the house's previous owners had put the rock right here.

God, what was he going to  _do?_

Eventually, he'd have to go back to the house. Avoid Flynn as much as he could. Try not to fuck up any more. Do whatever he needed to get Rufus back.

The problem was,  while Rittenhouse wasn’t jumping,  while they waited for Jiya and Connor to work their magic, while Denise kept him chained here, there wasn't much  _for_ him to do. He was a soldier. This whole skulking in remote government bunkers for weeks at a time thing, what was the damn  _point?_

Last time, Lucy had been gone, to nobody knew where. He'd been desperate to find her again. Now...

He told himself over and over again that thinking about Jessica was stabbing Rufus in the back. When he inevitably did it anyway, he just felt like, well, a backstabber.

And nobody  _got_ it. They didn't understand he was grieving Jessica just like they were all grieving Rufus. Because—

Oh, God damn the man. Flynn's words in 1972 echoed back to Wyatt:  _how can you move on if there's a chance you can get them back?_

But there was  _no_ chance, just like he'd told Lucy. Jessica had made her loyalties clear. The woman he'd loved had never  _existed_ . Either way, she was gone and he was grieving. And feeling damned guilty for it.

_You're abandoning them_ . Lucy's voice, now, soft and resolute.

No. Jessica was a big girl. She wasn't a damsel in distress. She didn't need him swooping in to save her from the big bad wolf. Not when she'd gone right along with them willingly.

_What about your baby?_

Wyatt savagely swatted a mosquito away from his face. There was no baby. That was just another thing Jessica had lied about. Another thing she'd  _taken_ from him.

God, he needed Lucy. He needed Rufus. But especially Lucy.

He was sorry, he was so sorry for everything he'd put her through. But she wouldn't even listen. Worse, she didn't seem to want to  _believe_ him. She'd been avoiding him ever since they'd moved in here. He'd grovel at her fucking feet, he'd do whatever she wanted, but— but she wasn't—

But she'd  _moved in with Flynn_ . Wyatt had told her he  _loved_ her and she'd moved in with  _Flynn_ .

Any way Wyatt looked at that, it made no damn sense. Was Flynn  _brainwashing_ her or something?

Last night certainly hadn't helped his standing in Lucy's eyes. He knew damn well what they all thought, that he was a reckless hothead who didn't care who he hurt. He knew they thought he didn't care about keeping his temper under control. They didn't know, they hadn't seen the fucking  _work_ he had put in, every day of his damned life since he was, what, eight? ten? to keep that same damn temper under control. He was  _better_ than his father at it, he always had been  _and he always would be_ , and he was so much better at it than when he was fifteen.

It just wasn't  _enough_ .

But— but he  _was_ better, than before. So why, all of a sudden, was it all going so wrong for him?

Because, for the first time since Jess— had died, he had people around him close enough to get hurt, when he lost it. That was why.

He was just so damn tired. And angry. And tired of being angry. And angry about being tired of being angry. And— but if the team was gonna be here, if  _he_ was gonna be here, then he owed them better.

Could he just—  _ignore_ Flynn? Wouldn't that be so damn  _restful?_ Wouldn't it drive the little shit— the  _big_ shit— crazy? What else could the man even  _take_ from him, at this point?

_My place on the team._

Oh,  _shit_ .

Those moments of thinking you had nothing else to lose, and then discovering you were wrong, were... exhilarating and horrifying.

Fine. Whatever. Wyatt had something to fight for. He had his team and he wanted to keep them, and they were  _going_ to save Rufus. He'd worked side by side with Flynn, even— even  _well_ — before. He could do it again.

He swatted at another mosquito. He was covered in sweat and he was thirsty. This Florida summer was a special level of hell, not as hot as the desert, but so  _muggy_ you could taste the air. Way too easy to get dehydrated, especially if— he glanced at the sun— you stayed out in it for two hours without noticing. He knelt by the creek's edge and splashed the water over his face and hair, but he wasn't gonna drink that. He headed back to the house.

Because it was just that kind of day, he ran into Flynn right outside the front door. Wyatt remembered all those noble-sounding resolutions he'd  _just made_ , and brushed by—

"Wyatt."

What.  _Now?_

Wyatt stopped, then turned.  _Remember everything you thought about out there_ . "You know what, Flynn?  _I don't care_ . I don't give a damn what you have to say. I care that you're helping us take down Rittenhouse, and if and when you turn against us, I'll kill you myself. Until then? We have  _nothing_ else to talk about."

Flynn looked at him like he was a moron. "I'm on your side, Wyatt."

"Sure. Yeah. Until you betray us."

"You're an idiot," Flynn told him bluntly. "I want  _one_ thing." He raised one finger. "To end Rittenhouse. What exactly do I have waiting for me, out there, after all? A life in prison, thanks to Agent Christopher's efforts? And yours?"

"Don't blame her for—"

"So. As long as you're fighting Rittenhouse, I'm here."

Wyatt tried and failed to think of a retort.

"But you wanna talk about  _commitment_ , Wyatt? What about all those months that you spent  _helping Rittenhouse,_ huh?"

He hissed out those words like— Not that Wyatt didn't understand the feeling, now, but, God, was it any wonder they thought he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal?

"I've been fighting for the same thing from the beginning. You? You're the ones who've gone back and forth. Even after you  _knew_ what they were." He made an ugly, sarcastic face. "Rittenhouse aimed you like a gun, and you just... went along with it, like a good little soldier."

Wyatt glowered at him. This asshole had no idea what it had been like, trying to fight him and Rittenhouse at the same time. "You know, Flynn, if you'd wanted allies, maybe you should've tried acting a  _little_ less like a psycho."

"Being  _nice_ to the people trying to kill me wasn't  _really_ on my priority list," he said, with a remarkably... psycho... look.

"Yeah, I bet 'acting like a normal person' is right up there with 'avoiding collateral damage' and 'leaving innocent bystanders out of it' on your list of useless skills."

Flynn's face hardened. "You—" He stopped. "What I was  _going_ to say..." he bit out. Then he hesitated, which was so weird that Wyatt actually waited. "I shouldn't have thrown your father in your face. I'm... sorry."

Wyatt stared at him, completely unnerved. Flynn had caught him flat-footed and he didn't like that at all. "Yeah, this is definitely convincing me you're not a Rittenhouse plant."

Flynn snorted. "Be honest, Wyatt, do you  _really_ think Rittenhouse could convincingly replace me?"

"Thank God for small favors," Wyatt muttered, and reached for the doorknob.

"You asked me how I don't hate myself."

Very, very reluctantly, Wyatt paused. Even more reluctantly, he turned.

"Because, Wyatt," Flynn said quietly. "It wouldn't. Do. Any. Good." He punctuated each word with a weird forefinger-thumb gesture.

Okay, seriously, this weird earnest Flynn was  _really_ throwing Wyatt for a loop. Even weirder that he was trying to be...  _helpful?_

"You actually screwed up. But now? You can wallow, and take it out on everyone in this damn house, and Rittenhouse'll be the only one to benefit. Or you can be useful. Your choice."

"Right," Wyatt said, with a sarcastic little smile. "Because you've always been so concerned about my welfare."

"I don't really care what happens to you, Wyatt. But I  _do_ care that you can help people I care about.  _If_ you stop being a dick."

"And by 'people,'" Wyatt said through gritted teeth, "you mean,  _Lucy_ ."

" _People_ , you know, more than one person? Believe it or not, this whole damn team is starting to...  _grow_ on me." 

The look on Flynn's face reminded Wyatt of the time his buddy had discovered a bizarre fungal infection on his feet. "Mmm, I'll go with not."

Flynn threw up his hands in an over-the-top 'I give up' gesture.

"So, let's see... I apologized, you apologized, we still don't like each other, good talk. I need a drink." Wyatt opened the door, then realized his tactical error. "Of  _water_ ," he snapped over his shoulder as Flynn followed him inside.

Flynn raised his hands and made the universal not-gonna-comment face. Ugh.

#

Rufus. Amy. The Mom who could have been. Each thud of her fists against the bag seemed to speak a name.

Covered in a disgusting amount of sweat, she leaned into it anyway. She hit harder, and faster. Only dimly did she realize that Garcia had stopped calling out strikes. Her body was moving on its own, now.

Instinctively.

Her anger and sorrow seemed to fall away, and the memory of her losses receded. The rhythm absorbed her. Not having to  _think_ felt like a blessing.

Mom had sent her and Amy both to dancing lessons when they were young. Lucy, naturally, had two left feet and had never gotten into it. She'd also never  _gotten_ it, always puzzled as to why and how people enjoyed this.

But now— now, here in this steamy rundown barn, with a grimy old punching bag, she understood the way people in the past had talked and written about the exhilaration of dancing.

She also, being honest, had some feelings to work out about what had happened with Wyatt the night before last. She would've been perfectly fine going the rest of her life never having to try to pull him off Garcia again.

At first she hadn't been able to believe he'd done that again. Now she believed it. She was just  _angry_ . She almost felt like she didn't know him any more.

She knew he'd talked with Jiya, with Garcia, and even with Denise. That was good, and she was glad. But she hadn't been receptive when he'd sought her out this morning. She just...

Denise had called, talking to them all one by one. She'd asked Lucy if she needed to come back. Lucy had told her no. They could deal with themselves, couldn't they? But, ultimately, that was up to Wyatt. None of the rest of them could force him to change.

_The last time he did something like that, he hit_ me. Not on purpose, and he'd felt awful, and she'd believed him. Of course that part had been an accident. But picking a fight with Garcia?  _That_ had been on purpose. And now he'd done it again.

Done it again and  _worse_ . Last time Garcia had had sharp words for Wyatt about Jessica, and while that didn't justify what Wyatt had done, it made it more understandable. This time? All Garcia had done was... step out of their bedroom.

And to top it off, Garcia was still recovering from Emma's bullet. Lucy was just... disgusted with the whole episode.

That disgust fueled her strikes. She felt each hit start in her core and work its way out. She seemed to know what she was going to do without having to think about it, with a fluidity that had never come naturally, before. Strange that something so violent felt so graceful.

That thought, or the sting of sweat in her eyes, jarred her back to normal awareness. She stopped, panting, and clumsily pushed her hair off her forehead.

Garcia was watching her quietly.

She looked down at her hands uneasily. "I didn't expect that to feel so good," she admitted.

"It's a form of exercise like any other."

She shook her head. "No it's not."

Who was she to balk at learning this, when—?

"You know," he said quietly, "Lorena, uh, was a dancer in college."

She looked up at him. She hadn't known that, and of course he knew she hadn't.

"Modern dance. She was never professional, and she didn't— she didn't join another group after college, but she kept up with it."

He paused, and licked his lips.

"Sometimes, when I was home I would... watch her practice. Not all the time, because it was something she did for herself, but... sometimes." He paused again, staring into the middle distance, and Lucy had a vivid mental image of a younger, less tormented Garcia, watching with rapt appreciation as a beautiful and graceful woman moved with the fluidity of water. It caused a strange, twisting feeling in her heart.

"I came to realize that what she did, and what I did when sparring with a friend," he continued, "I mean, when we  _really_ got into it, wasn't all that different. We were just... putting it to different uses, that's all." He looked down at Lucy. "It's just another set of tools, Lucy. That I'm showing you. Was not knowing how to throw a punch  _really_ the only thing standing between you and a homicide spree?"

Damn the man for making her smile. "No," she admitted.

What made her upset was living a life where this "tool set" might be useful. But learning, or not learning, how to defend herself... that wouldn't change what her life was now.

In her peripheral vision, she saw him watching. She tried to lighten the mood. "It's not  _just_ another form of exercise, you know. If it were, I'd be hopeless at it."

"Oh, come on. What about yoga and running?"

"Well, I— wait." She felt taken aback. "Was that in the journal?"

"You mentioned both, in passing." He hesitated. "I'm sorry, Lucy. To me, it seems... dishonest, to pretend I don't know. But if you prefer that, I will."

"No," she said after a minute. It  _was_ jarring. But— but asking him not talk about it wouldn't change the fact that he knew. He'd always been honest with her, and she didn't want that to change. "No, you don't have to do that."

He gave her a tiny smile, just a slight lightening of his expression, accompanied by a slight crinkling around his eyes.

"I did enjoy yoga," she told him after a moment or two. "But in grad school I had an  _amazing_ instructor, and once I came to Stanford, I... uh." She looked down. "The class I took there was mostly faculty spouses. I think three quarters were over sixty-five. It was, um, not rigorous."

"Ah."

She'd gone because it had helped her feel like she was pulling back from the maelstrom of... of everything. She'd gone for the sense of peace, of control, of reset. She definitely had not gone because of her amazing physical flexibility or coordination. "As for running, I lost track of the number of times I tripped on some  _minuscule_ crack and fell on the pavement." Apparently, that had been how she'd met Noah.

"Mm."

"The only thing I ever wasn't hopeless at was archery," she said after a minute. "Mom and Dad would send us to this retro, WASP-y, summer camp up in the mountains, and they had lessons. That, I was surprisingly not terrible at." She still remembered the deep satisfaction of that  _thwack_ of the arrow into the target.

"Done?" he asked after a minute.

She nodded. She started to undo the wraps, but between this and shooting for a while yesterday, her cramped and protesting fingers just didn't want to cooperate.

He held out his hand. Startled, she put her much smaller hand in his rough, warm one and let him do it for her. She couldn't imagine how you could hurt someone even if you unwrapped their hand as carelessly as possible, yet he was careful, almost  _gentle_ , like her hand was something...

"Other one?" he prompted.

He let go as soon as he was done, and the strength of her  _regret_ startled her. "Thanks... thanks, Garcia," she managed.

#

Jiya slumped down on the couch and propped her feet on a milk crate. "So," she said. "Let's assume I get this thing working. What do we do?"

She'd just died twice in the simulator, which seemed like a really bad sign. She was a lot better than she'd been in 1888 and she'd still gotten them home safely then, but right now, she just needed a  _break_ .

The room was, in fact, empty. Connor poked his head around the corner, frowning, maybe wanting to be sure she wasn't hallucinating.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"We save Rufus," he said.

"Well,  _yeah_ . But do we go back and kill Emma and the Rittenhouse party before they can attack? Warn our earlier selves what's going to happen? What?"

"Mmm." Connor frowned. They were quiet for a minute.

Wyatt came in from the kitchen, followed by Lucy. "We can't let Emma or anyone from Rittenhouse see us," he said. "If she sees us, she'll know what we did. They  _can't_ know this technology exists."

Another short silence as they all contemplated the depressing possibility of Rittenhouse able to travel in their own timeline.

"All right, well, the ambush plan is out," Jiya said.

"What if we just... grab Rufus and bring him back to the present?" Connor suggested.

They digested this.

"What about the weeks-long gap in his existence?" Lucy asked.

"Better than him being dead."

"If Rufus just disappears, our past selves are going to assume Rittenhouse has him and go looking for him," Wyatt said. "We might come back to find that someone else died trying to find him. We have to convince our past selves that he's all right."

"How do we do that?" Lucy asked. "Do we let  _us_ see us?"

"You all stood the shock reasonably well a few hours later," Connor pointed out.

"Yeah, but that wasn't in the middle of a firefight. And we  _saw_ the Lifeboat appear. Our past selves... will they believe us if we tell them about traveling in our own timelines, or are they going to think it's a Rittenhouse trick?"

"It wouldn't be news to me," Flynn said, from the other doorway.

Jiya hadn't heard him arrive, but his presence wasn't a particular surprise. His words were. She looked at him. "Explain that."

"You knew about this?" Wyatt demanded at the same time.

Flynn exchanged glances with Lucy, then looked at Jiya as he responded. "I have no idea  _how_ it's possible, or any of the details, but I... knew it would be."

" _How_ ?" Wyatt demanded again.

Flynn looked at Lucy again. She hesitated, then nodded. From the look of him, Wyatt neither missed nor appreciated that little exchange.

Flynn stepped further into the room. "I met Lucy in São Paulo in 2014 when she gave me her journal," he said. "Convinced me that time travel was possible. I actually had no idea you  _couldn't_ travel in your own timeline until I started doing some research, read various Mason Industries internal documents, talked to Anthony Bruhl."

Jiya probably looked as stunned as Wyatt and Connor did. "Have you ever been to São Paulo?" Wyatt asked Lucy.

"Not yet."

"And it didn't occur to you—" Jiya felt irritated. "To tell us about this?"

Flynn looked at her blankly. Almost too blankly. Her irritation increased. "No," he said.

"So," Wyatt said, after a pointed silence. "We go back to Chinatown, we grab Rufus, we find Flynn, tell him what's going on—"

"And, with your long history of trusting me implicitly, you take my word for it, quietly return to the present without Rufus, and just wait around for Jiya to invent this new technology." Flynn shrugged. "Yeah, I don't see any way that could go wrong."

The silence as they all thought about the fact that the success of this plan depended on them trusting Flynn not to have done something dastardly was... uncomfortable.

"Lucy will believe you," Wyatt said after a minute. He didn't even sound bitter about it, just resigned. "The rest of us..."

"We can each write our past selves a note," Jiya suggested. "Provide sufficient authenticating information and explain what happened. We give them to Flynn, he gives them to our past selves."

"We still have no way of knowing how our past selves will react," Lucy said. "We don't know what we'll come back to find. We're... messing with something far more personal than our usual trips."

"We know how our past selves will react," Wyatt said. "We  _were_ them. Besides. We don't have a choice."

"All right," Jiya said. "Second question. What do we do about Carol Preston and Jessica Logan?"

These silences were just getting thicker and stickier. She glanced around the room. Connor looked secretly impressed at her nerve. Wyatt and Lucy looked... well. About like you'd expect. Flynn was absolutely unreadable.

"They are Rittenhouse," Connor pointed out. "If we're keeping out of Rittenhouse's sight, then... nothing."

Wyatt shook his head. "What would we do with them?" He sounded bleak. "We can't bring seasoned Rittenhouse operatives back here."

"Look what happened last time," Flynn pointed out.

Wyatt looked at him. Flynn looked back, unmoved.

"We don't even go near any of Rittenhouse," Wyatt added after a pointed moment. "If they see us, we have to kill them before they can talk, and even with reinforcements from our past selves, who knows what Emma's backup plans were."

"Lucy?" Jiya prompted after a moment. She was staring at nothing.

They all looked at her.

"I lost my mother a long time ago," Lucy said finally. "Nothing that happens to Carol Preston in 1888 can change that."

"All right," Wyatt said after a collective moment of  _ouch-but-yes._ "Then it's a surgical strike. We go to get Rufus, we go  _to get Rufus_ . Nothing else. Not until we know..."

"That it works and doesn't destroy the fabric of the universe or have other unforeseen consequences," Jiya said with fake cheerfulness. "Which, right now, it doesn't, so... this is all hypothetical. Good talk, though."

The others drifted away. Lucy left first, both Wyatt and Flynn watching her go. Jiya increasingly had no idea what to conclude except that, when Lucy hurt, Flynn felt it. Which was one of the most unexpected things to come out of this whole... everything.

"And when are you going to have the conversation about who stays behind?" Connor asked quietly, when everyone else was gone.

Jiya looked at him.

"Keeping one seat for Rufus, there's three left and four of you. Either Wyatt, Flynn, or Lucy has to stay behind." He paused, and lowered his voice further. "Flynn's hurt, and Wyatt and Lucy both have... emotional complications with Chinatown."

Jiya slumped further, then willed herself to get up. "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

#

Everything in this damn place _bit_. The ants bit, leaving huge red pus-y welts. The mosquitoes bit even during the _day_. Even the "decorative" plant that sprawled all over the east side of the house bit, with its damn thorns. And now, there were biting horseflies.

Jiya lowered the gun to reload. "Could you shoot one of these with this?" she demanded, speaking loudly enough to be heard over their ear protection. She swatted at a fly.

Flynn apparently had no trouble decoding her ambiguous pronouns. He also, she noted with some dark amusement, looked much less menacing while swatting at flies. "I wouldn't. Waste of ammo."

"But  _could_ you?" she persisted. The fly also persisted. She smashed it against her thigh.

"Probably."

This damn  _place_ . Expose your arms and legs and the flies get them. Cover up, and you dehydrate and overheat. 

She really,  _really_ missed the Bay Area.

She put down the loaded gun and took a healthy drink of water. Flynn gave her a hard look, as if remonstrating for her not planning ahead before reloading. Okay, yes, she probably should have expected that she'd be thirsty, because she was  _always thirsty_ .

"Wait," he said abruptly when she put down her empty canteen. He walked off with it and his own, and came back a few minutes later. He handed hers over; it was reassuringly heavy again.

She gave him a grateful look, drank, and nearly spat it out. "Did you get this out of the  _hose_ ?"

"The side tap. It's clean." He took a long drink without any apparent qualms. He'd probably drunk much worse than warm, metallic, rubbery water.

Jiya waited until he was done, then started firing again.

A fly settled on her cheek. She twitched, but didn't dislodge it. She let go of the gun with one hand and swatted. It buzzed off. As soon as she'd put her other hand back on the gun, it landed on her forehead.

She growled, emptied the gun, and slapped at the fly until it gave up and went away. Just the thought of having something biting her  _face_ made her shudder in visceral disgust—

She pictured all the things that would have settled in on Rufus's dead face, and retched.

The gun was yanked away as she sank to the sandy dirt. Flynn crouched beside her, grabbed her chin, and forced her to look at him. She tried to push him away, but was too weak. "What did you last eat?" he demanded, gaze searching her face. "Where did it come from?"

She shook her head and pulled away, feeling the tears start.

"Jiya!"

"I'm not poisoned," she managed.

He frowned at her.

She looked away so she didn't have to see his expression, because she— couldn't— "I just— oh,  _God_ —" Rufus's  _body_ —

Flynn disappeared from view, except for his shoes. Her own sniffling filled a long and awful pause.

"I can keep going." Her voice was ragged. "Just give me a minute."

"Any, uh, lesson you could possibly learn about pushing through adversity," he said quietly, "you already know." He paused. "I'll put the guns away."

When he was gone, she wept.

It was such a  _relief_ not to have to silence herself. It hurt. Oh, it  _hurt_ . It ached, and there was no medicine in the world for this pain, because she'd loved Rufus fiercely and he was gone.

She snorted to a stop that she could tell would be temporary, but she wanted to wash the foul taste out of her mouth. She straightened up, uncapped her canteen, took a swallow of differently foul-tasting water, and then choked.

"How long have  _you_ been there?" she demanded.

That Connor had tears in his own eyes took away her cornered urge to be vicious.

"You don't need to cry in the dirt, do you?" He patted the downed tree on which he was sitting. "That's why shoulders were invented."

"Flynn told you I was out here crying?" Just when this day couldn't get any worse. She sniffled, and sat beside him.

"He said that you needed me. It didn't take a genius to work out that if it were a physical crisis, he'd be more suited to deal than I would." He handed her a tissue.

Jiya wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she turned her face into the offered shoulder. She couldn't tell him, she couldn't express the horror of— Rufus had held her, touched her, loved her, and then his flesh had—

"He's  _dead_ and they  _ate_ him," she mumbled.

"They— what?  _Rufus_ ? Who?"

"The bugs. They— a  _pauper's_ grave, Connor, they wouldn't have—"

"... oh." He paused. "Maybe try not to think about that part."

She choked, and started to cry again.

"Hey." He put his other arm around her shoulders. "You're going to get him back, Jiya. I know you are. All right?"

Slowly, she wound down. She pulled back and looked at him, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable, like something new-hatched. "You don't know that."

"No, I  _do_ know that. Because I know you."

"If you're just trying to make me feel better, I'll..." she mumbled after a minute or two.

"Perish the thought." He offered her a fresh canteen. It was cold. She rubbed it across her face and neck before she opened it, letting the condensation cool her.

She drank. She didn't really feel better for having cried. She just felt tired and empty. "Fuck," she said.

Connor paused. "Agreed."

"Why'd you have to take their damn  _money_ , Connor?"

"Because I was an idiot."

"Yeah, that's reassuring."

"Well, at least now you know I'm not just trying to make you feel better."

She snorted. "Maybe don't become a Hallmark writer."

"Oh, dear. Now how am I going to support myself in my old age?"

"You'll invest something else fantastical," she said after a minute, voice cracking from being roughened by her sobs. "When we get out of here. Become even more disgustingly wealthy than before, start Mason Industries 2.0, buy up all the remnants of what you'll then call the beta version, and..." Her imagination gave out, and she trailed off.

"And you and Rufus will come visit me with your kids and cheer my declining years. There. Sorted."

She thought. "I'm not sure I want kids," she said. "We never really— talked about it."

"And you and Rufus will come visit me with your nieces and nephews, pets, assorted protégés, and houseplants, and cheer my declining years."

She managed another watery snort.

"Now that we've agreed on that," he said, "I expect at least a cactus."

"Be careful what you wish for."

"Make me regret that and I'll be delighted. Now. It's miserable out here. What say we move to the Batcave?"

She propped her elbows on her knees and stared at the dirt. "What, where I can look at my failure?"

"Your  _failure_ ? Jiya, I'm starting to worry you're picking up things beyond shooting skill from Flynn. Like his melodramatic tendencies."

Unable to let that pass, she sat up and looked at him. "Says the man who recites  _Shakespeare_ as a  _hobby_ ."

"Touché," Connor admitted. "You know, I should ask him to read. I bet he'd be amazing."

"This I would have to see."

"That can be arranged. Come on." He gently nudged her to her feet. "Whatever you're feeling, dehydration and heat sickness aren't going to help."

"Fine," she sighed, aware she sounded like a child. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

"— 'or close the wall up with our English dead.' (Really, Jiya?) 'In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man—'"

"Oh, God, do you know the  _whole_ thing?"

"— 'as modest stillness and humility.' (Well, I have some opinions on  _that_ .) 'But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger...'"

#

Garcia moved his right arm in an experimental circle. He'd been moving it for a while, of course, much sooner than he probably should have. But this time he wasn't ignoring the pain, he was observing it. Or rather, observing its near-absence.

He heard the footstep behind him, so Wyatt's voice didn't startle him: "Clean bill of health?" He was using that new, determinedly pleasant tone again.

Garcia fixed an equally pleasant, equally  _sincere_ smile on his face before he turned around: "Yes."

"Good." Pause. "It's, uh, good that you've managed to give Jiya and Lucy some training anyway."

"Mmm."

Pause. "I know it's not easy teaching inexperienced people. Do you want me to help? I'm not questioning your competence, so save your wounded—"

"Train Jiya."

Wyatt took a second to recover his footing. "Well," he said coolly. "I walked right into a plan requiring  _you_ to spend lots of quality time with Lucy."

Garcia looked down at him. He had a fair intuition Wyatt didn't like that. "Lucy's capable of making other arrangements if she wants them."

Lucy's choices were Lucy's business. But telling Wyatt to ask Lucy who she preferred to have teach her would put her in the position of trying to spare someone's feelings, and she didn't need that effort.

And, frankly, they didn't need to ask, did they?

If Lucy  _wanted_ Wyatt to teach her, Garcia, quite rightly, would keep his mouth shut. But, though Lucy had said very little about Wyatt and Garcia had asked nothing, only an utter idiot would miss the constraint between them.

Wyatt was simmering even at that oblique reminder of his interpersonal situation. But he'd hurt Lucy, badly. It wasn't Garcia's business to call him to account, but he certainly wasn't going to mince words when the subject came up. Wasn't that how you trained puppies? Pointed out their messes so they learned not to shit everywhere?

Garcia was confident his theory was sound.

"Always an answer to everything," Wyatt said.

Garcia couldn't stifle his short, bitter bark of laughter. "If I had all the answers I wouldn't be here."

"What, stuck with the rest o—"

" _Without. My family_ ."

They stared at each other.

"Must be  _so_ terrible to be human like the rest of us, Flynn," Wyatt said finally.

Garcia felt his patience rapidly evaporating. He'd grudgingly agreed to stop baiting him, but surely that didn't extend to direct  _provocation_ , did it?

"I'll talk to Jiya," Wyatt said finally, walking away.

Garcia almost resented him for making a credible effort. "There's another reason," he pointed out. "For that, uh, arrangement."

Wyatt stopped, and turned his head vaguely back in Garcia's direction.

"In terms of size and experience, Jiya and Lucy are far better matched to test each other than either of us are with either of them. If you teach Jiya and I teach Lucy, they'll each pick up a different set of skills. Facing each other will be a real test, and in teaching the other what she doesn't know, they'll both learn."

"You're annoying when you're right," Wyatt finally muttered.

Garcia smirked, though Wyatt wasn't looking at him. "Only then?"

"No." Wyatt turned back to look at him. "Also when the sun's shining... when it's not... days ending in Y... pretty much whenever you're breathing."

"I'd hate to think I was losing my touch."

"But let's leave the egos behind, huh, Flynn? The girls don't need us pitting them against each other for the sake of our dick-measuring."

"Wyatt, I'm wounded."

"Not nearly as wounded as you could be."

Garcia snorted despite himself. "Fine. We'll only pit them against each other to the extent that it's helpful—"  _And Lucy will win_ .

Lucy would win, not for the sake of showing Wyatt up, but because if Garcia gave her training anything less than his absolute best, he'd have failed her.

"Helpful  _to them_ ."

"Of course. What else could I have possibly meant?"

Wyatt shook his head, and walked away.

#

She progressed to the point where Garcia stepped into the metaphorical ring with her.

Not that she'd progressed very  _far_ — not in a hundred years would she be able to seriously challenge him. But now she knew enough that an opponent would be useful, and hurt and out of practice as he was, this might even be helpful for him.

She took a last drink of water, then stepped squarely in front of him. When he didn't move, she raised her eyebrows.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Yes." Something about the way he asked prompted her to add, "Why wouldn't I be?"

He hesitated. "We do have— no.  _I_ do have a history of, ah, dragging you or throwing you out of my way so I could kill someone."

"Are you trying to kill anyone right now?"

He gave her an oh-please look.

"Then there's no problem." She raised her fists to protect herself, just like he'd showed her.

He still didn't move to engage her. "What?"

"Lucy—" He looked down at her, then away. He took a step back.

Lucy looked down at herself, saw absolutely no reason why he'd hesitate, and looked back at him.

"After you spared John Rittenhouse," he said in a rush. "You were afraid. Of me. And for a few minutes—" He looked at her, and then away. "I was glad."

He stood with his head bowed.

Lucy watched him until he reluctantly raised his gaze to her face again, as if waiting for her to pronounce a sentence. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I know. I knew."

She'd taken him by surprise. His head came up. He looked at her, a clear question in his eyes.

There were no... extenuating circumstances. He'd done what he'd done. She couldn't explain it away if she wanted to, and she didn't want to. He'd thought she'd hurt him, taking away his chance for the one thing he wanted, and he'd wanted to hurt her in return. It wasn't a nice impulse.

But it was a human one.

And Lucy understood that, now. She'd been fully willing,  _eager_ , to shoot Emma, though Emma had been unarmed, injured, and pleading for her life. It hadn't been a cool tactical decision. It had been a furious raging desire to cause  _pain_ .

So Lucy shrugged.

Garcia still watched her, looking disturbed. It wasn't hard to think of why that might be. "Fear and forgiveness aren't the same thing, Garcia," she told him quietly. Then, because she'd rather be awkward but crystal clear as to her meaning than wonder if he was still nursing secret dark worries: "I'm not your mother."

He looked confused, almost said something, and then her meaning hit him. Not his mother, specifically, not  _Maria Flynn._ He started to speak, stopped, and touched his tongue to his upper lip. "And here I thought I'd be the one throwing you off-balance today," he said finally.

"I'm hoping that still happens." Slowly, she raised her hands again. "We good?"

He turned, because he'd be leading with his left for a while yet. "Slow, remember," he cautioned. "The goal is to improve your form. Okay." He raised his hands like hers. "Come on."

#

"Jiya?"

Jiya opened her eyes and blinked up at Wyatt. What? She'd come upstairs to pee, and then she'd just sat down for a second, and—

_Ohshitohshitohshit_ she had work to do. She leapt to her feet.

"Hey, whoa." Wyatt grabbed her shoulder to steady her, which was  _totally unnecessary_ , she was  _fine_ . "When was the last time you ate something?"

"I'm fine," she snapped. She shrugged off his hand.

"Look, we all miss him, but we're not gonna get him back if you push yourself so hard you can't—"

"You miss him?" she demanded. "It's your fault he's  _dead_ , Wyatt."

She saw that hit him. Hurt flashed across his expression. Then it faded into acceptance. "Yeah," he said quietly. "It is."

"I—" She hesitated. "That's true, but it's not fair. It's not  _only_ your fault. Maybe not even mostly your fault."

"I appreciate the thought," he told her, with a smirk that had nothing at all to do with actual amusement. "But... don't bother."

She looked away, not too pleased with herself. Yeah, it was true, but she hadn't said it because it was true, she'd said it because she'd wanted to lash out and hadn't bothered to think about the consequences.

In other words, what she'd been so pissed with him for doing when Connor had told her about that whole debacle.

"What did you want?" she asked, more gently than she might have under other circumstances.

"Uh, Flynn wanted me to take over your combat training. That okay with you?"

She frowned. "What?"

"Look, you can  _ask_ him—"

"No, I believe you, I just... wasn't expecting that." Partly because Connor, as promised, was keeping Wyatt busy. Together, they'd added more solar panels to the roof of both buildings, a truly awful and thankless job. Then, using the extra power, they'd set up a crude machine shop out in the barn, so the team didn't have to wait nearly so long for spare parts or do as much jury-rigging.

Wyatt shrugged. "Teaching the both of you to shoot  _and_ fight... it shouldn't be all on him. So, I said I'd help."

And Flynn and/or Lucy had been very emphatically against the idea of Wyatt teaching Lucy? Jiya began to get the picture now.

"Plus, you know, it's good to get exposed to multiple styles."

"Well, I've already pretty much mastered saloon-fu in a long, stupid skirt."

He snorted.

"Why didn't you stop him?" she demanded suddenly.

"... Rufus?"

She nodded. "I know... you had to go back to stop Rittenhouse from destroying the Lifeboat. Hell, we should probably  _still_ go back and destroy the other one so they can't. But why'd you let him come after  _me?_ I warned you!"

"Jiya, the way you feel about Rufus now? He felt about  _you_ . He told me that if something happened to you, he didn't think he could ever forgive me."

"But I  _warned_ you!" Why did  _none_ of them ever  _listen_ to her?

"C'mon, Jiya, we both know you would've done the same thing."

She glared at him, even angrier because she knew he was right. "That's what Flynn said," she muttered.

Wyatt looked startled.

"Did it even occur to any of you to listen to me?" she demanded.

"Jiya..." He sighed. "Look, I know how you feel."

" _Do_ you, Wyatt? Do you  _really?_ "

"In 1972, Flynn captured us. He kept me hostage to force Lucy and Rufus to go run a psycho errand for him. I told them to take the Lifeboat and go home. They didn't listen. I don't think they even thought about it."

"But you all came home from that trip."

Wyatt looked at her for a minute. "Jiya, I know what it's like to blame yourself when someone you love dies, all right?"

"I'm not—"

"Just— cut the bullshit, okay? I  _know_ . I did it for years. But you listen to me. Emma shot Rufus. Jessica put her in a position to do it. And I let Jessica in. There's no room here for anyone else to blame. So butt out."

"I'm  _not_ blaming myself."

"Yeah, sure you're not."

She folded her arms over her chest and stared at him.

He shrugged.

She wanted to tell him to take his condescending insights and shove them, except, damn him, he was... right. "Lemme know when you wanna start," she muttered, and retreated to the Batcave.

#

Slowly, Lucy improved to the point where she found that same instinctive rhythm with Garcia as with the punching bag.

Always, always, slow and steady. He always blocked, never attacked or let her land a hit on him. But— she could see the sequence of the mock-fight. What to do next. And her body responded without her conscious direction.

He called a pause. She reached for her water bottle— for  _one_ of her water bottles— and drained half of it before she came up for air.

"You're getting better," he told her.

She took another drink. "I know."

She valued his praise, because she knew it was honestly earned. But it disturbed her. And he could tell.

He came to lean against the half-wall next to her with his own water bottle. For a few moments they just stood there together, drenched in sweat and radiating heat.

"Emma's really good," she said quietly. "I mean, she holds her own against  _Wyatt_ . I could train for a year and still not be able to beat her. And we don't have a year."

No one knew how long they had, or why Rittenhouse wasn't jumping again. Trying to get some answers was why Denise was so often absent— well, that, and the fact that her family was on the other side of the country.

"It's not all or nothing, Lucy. Maybe you... get lucky. Maybe you convince her you're not worth the trouble. Maybe you slow her down just long enough to escape."

"I know," Lucy sighed. "I just—"

She took another long drink to buy herself time.

"The Lucy you met in São Paulo, was she a fighter?" she finally blurted out.

He hesitated. "Yes."

"And... and the Lucy who stepped out of the Lifeboat. She definitely was."

He watched her.

"Maybe that should make me feel better, knowing I at least have the capacity?" she muttered. "But I just wonder—..." She took another drink. "I wonder what they had to go through. To become that."

He was quiet so long she finally looked up at him. The elephant in the room was, of course, the obvious parallel here.

"I wish I could've done it alone," he said.

Her initial surprise turned to firmness. "No. That's not on you, Garcia. To have won this war all by yourself? No. Rittenhouse dragged you into this. And then I did."

"I know," he said. "Still."

"Still, nothing."

That got her a small, rueful smile, and a lack of further protest. After a moment, he drained his water bottle. "Ready to go again?"

She sighed. "No," she admitted, finished her own water, and pushed herself off of the wall. "But yes."

#

Wyatt shut the laptop more forcefully than necessary. He was starting to hate this therapist, and it had only been two sessions.

_You seem like you're carrying a lot of guilt_ , she'd observed, in a hatefully non-confrontational tone.

_Yeah, doc, and how many years'd you go to school to reach_ that _brilliant conclusion?_

He was— look. He was grateful that Denise had somehow found a shrink who'd do this over Skype, and who had a high enough security clearance that, if Wyatt couldn't tell her about  _time travel_ , he could still give her most of the big picture. A shrink that Denise had sworn couldn't possibly be Rittenhouse, and could be trusted.

Much as he hated to admit it, he was in a bad place. He'd sent enough of his guys off to have their heads examined when they needed it that he knew— or at least would faithfully parrot— that there was nothing wrong with it, sometimes you just needed help just like you needed help shaking off the flu, etc., etc.

But  _damn_ , he hated talking about himself to a stranger. Especially a stranger being paid to turn him inside out, though he'd insisted, politely and then forcefully, that he was really just interested in getting the— the grief, the lashing out at his teammates, under control. 

Note to self: forcefully insisting something to a shrink was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.  _I've had hostile interrogations go better than this_ .

A lot of guilt.  _Yeah. That's one way to put it._

Everything he touched lately seemed to turn to shit.

Jessica. God. Wyatt rubbed his hand over his face, and felt that gut-punch all over again. Hadn't wanted to believe it, had refused to believe it, reality had still barreled right along and steamrollered him under it. And, worse,  _Rufus_ .

Had  _any_ of it been real, with her? Any of the best parts of his life? Or had she been Rittenhouse in that old timeline, too? Were all his memories a lie?

And Lucy—

Wyatt had apparently hurt  _her_ badly enough to drive her into the arms of Garcia fucking  _Flynn_ , of all people.  _Flynn!_

It was so horrifying that it would have been easier to think she was doing it just to fuck with him. Except he knew better than to think that; Lucy wasn't petty. No, this, apparently, was what she  _wanted_ .

Wyatt could barely contain his loathing.

But Wyatt had made his priorities pretty clear to her, hadn't he? After the Alamo she'd stood up for him and kept him from being yanked from the team, saying she didn't want anyone else. But he'd chosen Jessica over that loyalty, going after her even though he knew it would be the end of their partnership—

And the end of anything they could have had together.

Jessica had stayed dead and Wyatt had moved on. With Lucy. And then Jessica had come back and Wyatt had... barreled out of Lucy's love life again. To be fair, he'd  _talked_ to Lucy. More than once! Lucy had insisted he go with Jessica. And that had maybe hurt, a little, but, well... Lucy habitually placed everyone else's happiness over her own. Of course she was going to insist on that. No matter what she actually wanted.

That really was the only spark of hope he had left, and it was a dim one. Because he'd told her he  _loved her_ , and... now she was treating him like he had the plague.

And sleeping with Flynn.

Then to seal the deal with her, he'd made it clear he didn't intend to go after Jess  _or_ their maybe-real unborn kid. Made it clear to Lucy, who'd narrowly escaped being forced into Rittenhouse, that he wasn't gonna try to save Jess, who  _had_ been forced into Rittenhouse, or their kid, who  _would_ be forced into Rittenhouse.

Assuming Jess had told the truth about her childhood  _and_ the baby, both of which were pretty big ifs. It was so much easier to think she'd lied about the whole thing as some sick psycho manipulation, except Lucy was insisting on believing it.

The only thing Wyatt wanted badder than a drink was to not see his damned  _father_ next time he looked in the mirror, so... the drink was probably out.

It hurt more this way. Two years ago he hadn't had Jessica, he'd had no idea that there was any prospect of getting her back, and he hadn't met Lucy. He'd been a bit of an alcoholic mess, sure, but he'd been...  _functional._ Now he was right back there again, same place, but having had all of that ripped away— it  _hurt_ like  _hell_ .

Well, but.

He'd been here before. He knew how to go on. He'd done it before.

Sure, he'd lost most of what had made life bearable the last two years. But there was still a fight to win. Rufus to get back. Rittenhouse to burn to the ground—

Jesus, he was starting to sound like Flynn.

— and Lucy to...

He was living in the same house as her and he still missed her so badly. He missed the way her hair fell across her pillow. He missed the warmth in her eyes when she looked at him. He missed her turning to him and no one else for comfort—

Well. Lucy had made her own priorities clear. And right now, they didn't include him. And the more he refused to accept that, the more she'd pull away. He could put a good face on it for a while, right? He owed her that much, anyway, as her friend.

And there was _not a snowball's chance in hell_ that _Garcia_ _Flynn_ could make her happy longterm. No way. _Whatever_ they had going on between them, it would end. And when it did, Wyatt, having _not_ burned all his bridges with her...

Well. Maybe there'd be a possibility.

He did need a drink, but not the alcoholic kind. It was sweltering up here and he'd had to  _talk_ so  _fucking_ much that he was out of water.

He ran down the stairs and nearly slammed into Flynn, who was coming out of the bathroom. "Oh, uh, sorry, Wyatt," he said. "I didn't see you there."

_Working together working together working together_ , Wyatt reminded himself grimly. Not  _he's fucking Lucy he's—_

No,  _not_ that. 

He settled for making a vague noise and sliding past. He felt proud of himself for not retorting,  _They say eyesight is the first thing to go._

#

"Jiya!"

"Down here," Jiya muttered. The bottom of the Lifeboat didn't respond, but anyone with any sense would know to look for her down here, anyway. And that hadn't been a panicked shout, so—

"JIYA!"

She pulled herself out from under the Lifeboat, scrambled to her feet, grabbed the big wrench, and sprinted towards the far ladder. Going up the house ladder would only put her in the middle of any trouble upstairs. This way she could come out the back side of the barn, sneak around, flank whoever was—

She burst into the kitchen. "What is it? Where are they?"

Connor, Lucy, and Wyatt looked at her in surprise.

"Where are who?" Connor asked.

She lowered the wrench. "Whatever you called me upstairs to deal with."

"Ah yes," Connor said. He pulled a plastic cover off a dish in the middle of the table. "Happy birthday, Jiya."

She looked blankly from it to him. "... Oh."

Lucy pushed out the fourth chair for her. She sat down. Connor started cutting the cake.

"You're not going to, uh..."

"We are absolutely going to sing," Wyatt told her firmly. "Lucy performed for a room full of Hollywood stars back in 1941."

Lucy didn't quite make eye contact with Wyatt, but the smile she gave Jiya was sincere enough. "That's right."

Jiya sighed. "Where's Flynn?"

"He borrowed the neighbor's truck to take the trash to the county dump." Wyatt didn't look upset about this development.

Jiya looked at the generous slice Connor had served her. "Who made this?" His current good mood notwithstanding, she didn't think Wyatt would have done it. Lucy was... improving, in the kitchen, but a cake was still beyond her abilities. And if someone told her 'Flynn,' Jiya was absolutely not going to believe them.

"I did," Connor said. "I was about seven when it struck me as fundamentally unjust that I got a birthday cake each year while my mother did not. So, the next year, I surprised her with one. After suffering through that, she taught me to bake."

Jiya smiled despite herself, and dug in. "Hey, this is really good," she mumbled around her mouthful.

"I'll try not to be insulted by your surprise." Connor smiled at her.

"Hey," Wyatt said. "Wait, we didn't..."

Jiya gave him her best cool  _I am a competent and dangerous woman and you'd better back off right now_ look, honed by three years of surviving in Chinatown. 

It didn't phase him at all.

So she put her fork down and suffered through the embarrassment of the three of them singing "Happy Birthday" to her. Except, secretly, she kind of liked it. Lucy did have a really lovely voice, and Connor and Wyatt were surprisingly... decent.

They were all massive dorks, and she maybe kind of loved them.

"Thanks," she muttered when they were done.

"No presents, I'm afraid," Connor said. "Being on the run rather hampers your ability to order off Amazon."

"No, this is... this is great, guys," she admitted. "Thank you."

"And after this," Connor said, "we're going to watch a movie. I built a DVD player out of spare parts and hooked it up to that ancient relic of a television. Denise brought us a few DVDs."

"I don't have time—"

"Doctor's orders," Lucy told her firmly.

Jiya stared at her. "What doctor?"

"Doctor Preston."

Jiya groaned, but submitted to being led into the living room. Until...

"Now," Connor said, "I have it on good authority that this is your favorite Star Trek—"

"No," Jiya said, spying the cover. "No. Absolutely not, Rufus  _lied_ to you because he is a  _terrible_ man, we are  _not_ watching the one with the whales. No. No way. Did I mention no?"

They watched it anyway. Jiya insisted on drinking.

Afterward, Lucy went to bed, Wyatt went out for a walk, and Connor went downstairs to work on something. He forbade Jiya from coming with him.

"The best birthday present I could give myself would be progress," Jiya argued.

"No, the best birthday present you could give yourself would be  _sleep_ . Marathon, remember?" He closed the trapdoor in her face.

Jiya sighed, then went out to the kitchen to switch out her empties for some more water.

She hadn't heard him come in, but Flynn was standing over the sink with a plate of cake. There was, inexplicably, a cardboard box of zucchini on the counter.

She put her hands on her hips. "Skip the celebration and eat the leftovers afterwards? Isn't that a little tacky?"

Not that a murderer would care about tacky.

In his sudden stillness she read surprise, but it wasn't possible that her  _presence_ had surprised him. He turned. "I thought you'd prefer it that way," he said carefully.

Oh. Ah. Um. "Oh," she said. "... no?"

She wanted to say  _yes_ , to say  _you're a killer and you're not really part of the team_ . But it wouldn't be entirely true and it wouldn't be entirely fair.

" Where’d the zucchini come from?" she asked, as a more neutral subject.

"The neighbor I borrowed the truck from. Payment for letting me take it."

She frowned at him, but he seemed to think that was a logical sentence.

"Don't take this the wrong way," she said abruptly, "but I hope you're not at the next one—"

He raised his eyebrows. "I'm  _not_ offended," he said drily.

"— because I hope we're  _out_ of here by then. Well." She considered. "I guess it could be the reunion party. Time Team reunion tour, Jiya's birthday."

"... ah."

"For the sake of your cinematic sensibilities, it's probably best that you weren't here," she added, filling her glass at the sink.

"I heard you were watching the one with the whales."

She blinked at him. "That's not the kind of thing I'd expect you to know about."

Not that Croatia was the end of the world, not that Star Trek wasn't an international community, not that he lived under a rock... just, it seemed a little  _frivolous_ for him.

"I saw it in theaters."

She stared at him. "That," she said solemnly, "explains so much about you."

He looked confused, then let out a snort of laughter. "It's not a bad movie."

She gaped at him. "It— how can— okay, your tragic lack of taste notwithstanding, it's bad  _Star Trek_ ."

"Why? Because it's lighthearted? Because it's not centered around space battles and blowing things up?"

"Because— it just—" She sputtered wildly. Where did you even  _start_ with a heathen like this? "You are dead to me."

He cast an amused glance at the three beer bottles in her hand. "And you're a lightweight."

"I am not  _drunk_ ," she said with dignity. "I just have very,  _very_ strong  _opinions_ about this. Which are objectively  _correct_ , by the way.  _First_ of all—"

She blinked, realizing how loudly she was talking, and how incredibly witty she felt, which was usually a bad sign.

He was doing a terrible job of trying not to laugh.

"I," she said, with even more dignity, "am going to bed." She took her water glass, went off to her bedroom, and took two preemptive painkillers before she went to sleep.

At least, for once, she slept soundly.

#

The next night, they revisited an old topic and tried to puzzle out that visit from TTL 2.0.

"I don't like it." Wyatt shook his head.

"Now  _there's_ a surprise," Flynn muttered.

Wyatt didn't look at him, but paused long enough to make it clear he'd heard. "All these timelines. They contain every possible version of events, right?"

"The infinitely branching multiverse is one theory, yes," Connor said.

"Then we need to consider that there's a timeline out there where— some of us become Rittenhouse." His mouth thinned. "And that future Lucy and I came from that timeline."

Several people talked at once. Lucy's voice got traction. "That doesn't make any sense. If we're Rittenhouse, why show ourselves how to go back in our own timeline?"

"Maybe to lure us into a trap and kill us all, not just Rufus. Take the Lifeboat. Think about it." He warmed to his topic. "There's so many questions. Why Lucy and I? Where are the rest of us?"

Maybe... maybe because it was more difficult to jump back in your own timeline, the Lifeboat couldn't carry as many people that way. Which meant, if two were the limit, she'd be going alone to get Rufus—

"Dead."

Everyone looked at Flynn.

"How could you possibly know that?" Wyatt sounded irritated.

"Lucy told me. New Lucy," he amended, as now-Lucy looked confused.

"Why did she tell  _you_ ?"

"Apparently, she considered me the most trustworthy."

"Right," Wyatt said after a minute. "We'll watch Lucy for blows to the head."

"All of us?" Connor asked before Flynn could retort.

"Jiya and I, definitely. You, probably, because you're always here. It's possible Agent Christopher is still alive in their timeline."

"But you don't think so," Lucy said.

He hesitated. "No."

"That makes even less sense," Wyatt said after a minute. "If things get that bad, why come back to now-us? Why not just go save Rufus themselves?"

Several things went  _click_ together in Jiya's mind. "They can't," she realized.

Everyone looked at her, now. "They  _can't_ ," she repeated, understanding setting in. "These equations. I've been puzzling over them for weeks, trying to understand the state they're in—" 

She registered their blank looks, and skipped ahead. "It's harder to jump back in your own timeline  _in the past_ than in what used to be your present. It's, it's another set of problems to solve. You have to combine the calculations for going back in time in the first place, with the calculations for going back in time  _again_ ,  _with_ the calculations for going back in time  _in your own timeline_ . Think of it as... another layer of... time-gravity."

Connor looked pained.

"I must have gotten going back into your own present working, but then died before anything else," she added.

She felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her. The equations weren't incomplete because it was some weird sadistic test. She wasn't stupid, either. It was because they  _needed_ her to finish it.

"And they can't go back and grab Rufus from the present before Chinatown because then there's no pilot to go back for Jiya," Lucy guessed.

Jiya had never expected learning about her own death to feel like such a relief. Not that she'd ever expected to learn about her own death at all.

Their lives were weird.

And if alt-her had already gotten this far starting from zero, then she knew her-her could finish it by building on alt-her's work.  _Don't worry, dead future self. We've got this. You did— you did good._

She saw a weird picture of her future self handing her the sheaf of equations across a time chasm. She blinked, trying to clear her mind. Had that been a real vision or just a mental image?

Everyone was staring at her again.

"So... can you?" Wyatt asked.

_Can? Well_ — 'Can' maybe felt like a bridge to far, but: "I will," she promised.

#

About five hours later, that brave promise was ringing hollow to her. 

She didn't have time to waste staring at her ceiling when she couldn't sleep. She'd do some simulator runs instead. She detoured to the kitchen for some water, and sat down, and...

She was too tired to get up.

_I need to get up. Rufus needs me. What's a little fatigue?_

But it wasn't just a  _little_ fatigue. And it wasn't just physical.

_I hate that without him, I am this person._ She'd functioned just fine without him for years, without any partner. Then she'd done it again in Chinatown. Except that had been different: she'd known, then, that he was alive and well somewhere else.

Now, she felt his absence bitterly, like she never had in the 19 th century.

_Is this what love does to you? Makes you dependent?_

_... I am never getting him back._

In the truth of that, she felt an ache as huge and terrible as the sea.

Slowly, it passed, and left her in just the same place, in just the same way: sitting in a dingy little kitchen in rural Florida, staring at the grease-spattered backsplash, mechanically swatting mosquitoes, because it was too hot to sleep.

Quiet footsteps. She was too tired to care whose they were, but her hard-won survival instincts perked up anyway and told her they were probably Flynn's. They were. He filled two glasses at the tap, added ice from the freezer, and refilled the tray with water.

He turned and considered her.

She stared back, too tired to disguise her vague hostility. In soft shorts and a T-shirt, feet bare and hair tousled, he looked disarmed and disarming. Whether he was  _actually_ disarmed, she wasn't going to look hard enough to know.

He went quietly down the hallway. But first, he left one glass on the table.

Jiya felt a sharp surge of some emotion she was too tired to identify right away. Resentment that he thought she needed this? That he thought stooping to grace her with his presence might help? Relief, at not being alone? Resentment again, at  _Garcia Flynn_ , who'd set Rufus up to die, being the bulwark between her and unwelcome solitude?

_And then fought like hell to save his life_ , an unwelcome part of her brain reminded her.

Whatever.

He returned carrying a flashlight and—

"You want to play  _cards_ ?" she demanded, just above a whisper.

"Want?" One syllable and he managed to pronounce it like it was a foreign word, damn the man. "You look like you're about five minutes from breaking out the hard liquor, and one drunkard's enough for the team."

"And so you're, what, saving me from myself?"

His lips compressed like that was hilarious. "I can't sleep either. Can't read or the flashlight will wake Lucy. As long as we're both out here avoiding sleep, we might as well distract ourselves, no?"

"Fine," she sighed. "Deal."

As she watched him shuffle very quietly, by the light of the flashlight, she reflected that her life had taken some strange, strange turns.

"No one ever told me love is a trap," she said. "You can't come back from it."

He paused in the middle of dealing, looked at her from under his eyebrows, and continued.

Jiya did not. The thought was complete. It was enough to have it out there, out of her brain.

"Aces high or low?"

"High." She picked up her cards.

Flynn played cards with the same brutal efficiency with which he fought. Jiya found herself behind very quickly, but she didn't care. She was distracted. That was enough. They didn't talk, which was even better.

More footsteps. Someone smaller than Flynn, which didn't narrow it down at all. Wyatt appeared, also carrying an empty water glass. This kitchen was basically an oasis in the sticky hell of the house, wasn't it? That thought struck her as inordinately funny. She really was tired, wasn't she?

Wyatt looked at them. "What is this?"

"Insomnia strip poker." Flynn played a run and discarded.

Wyatt turned to her.

"Rummy. No stakes. Want us to deal you in next hand?" He'd be far behind, but she didn't think any of them cared about that.

Flynn gave her a cold look, as if she was breaking the unspoken rules. Too bad. Garcia Flynn, of all people, didn't get to complain about rule-breaking.

"Sure," Wyatt said after a minute, and Flynn's glare transferred to him.

Wyatt filled his water glass and took the seat to her right. "So, Lucy doesn't mind you sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night?" he asked as Jiya dealt.

Flynn didn't even acknowledge the jibe. Jiya had seen his room, their room, from the hallway: one twin bed and one cot. She didn't think Lucy was so head-over-heels in  _whatever_ with him as to want to be pressed up against a human furnace when the heat index was about a million.

Not that Jiya would have objected had Rufus been here.

_He_ will  _be_ , she told herself firmly.  _He_ will _be and we will complain about this God-awful humidity together._

She wished she could believe it.

She slid lower in her chair and tried to focus on her cards as the game wore on. None of them were particularly invested in the game, but no one wanted to leave.

She was so  _tired_ . The cards swam in front of her eyes. Flynn took a long time with his discard. Jiya stretched out one arm, making sure her cards couldn't be seen, and laid her head on her arm. 

"Jiya?"

"Just resting my eyes." When it was her turn, she'd...

Time seemed to stretch out and then snap back. All of a sudden her mouth was gummy and her eyes sticky. Her face was on her cards, and her back hurt, but she had no desire to move. Sleep. Back to sleep...

When she woke again, it was broad daylight, and she was in her own bed.

#

Garcia and Wyatt decided she and Jiya were ready to square off.

Lucy wasn't at all sure about that. Hitting the bag was one thing. Striking at Garcia, predictable and controlled, was one thing. But deliberately trying to land a blow on someone? On  _Jiya_ ?

But this was something she needed to learn to fight Rittenhouse. Maybe to save a life some day. Maybe if she'd been faster, more observant, in Chinatown— if she'd had more of the skills Wyatt and Garcia had— she could even have saved Rufus. Rufus, who'd deserved better than his team had done for him.

So... so that was it.

She would have preferred that Garcia and Wyatt not watch. That made it feel too much like a spectacle. But she knew they needed to, so they could critique and correct.

She finished wrapping her hands and looked up. She pictured hitting Jiya, and felt sick. But Jiya, coolly wrapping her own hands, appeared to have no qualms.

Jiya had toughened up. She'd become who she needed to to fight Rittenhouse. So what was wrong with Lucy, that, after everything—

After shooting that defenseless soldier who'd been begging for his  _life_ , for God's sake.

— that she balked at this?

The others had sacrificed far more. Who was she to have this stupid qualm?

The sick feeling intensified.

"Ready?" Jiya asked.

Lucy glanced at Garcia and Wyatt, leaning side-by-side against adjacent stalls, to make sure she and Jiya had enough room. She looked back to Jiya, and nodded.

Jiya took half a step forward, testing Lucy's reactions. Lucy shifted her weight back, hands up to protect her face. They turned a quarter circle.

Jiya swung. Instinct kicked in; Lucy blocked, and used the momentum to sidestep a bit. Both of them brought their hands back to what Lucy had come to think of as "home."

Jiya swung again, higher and faster. Lucy blocked again. She was suddenly thankful for all the time Garcia had spent drilling her: it was automatic, now.

She risked a quick glance in his direction. His expression was thoughtful, but otherwise inscrutable—

Jiya's weight shifted, and Lucy's attention snapped back to where it belonged.

Lucy lost track of time. Her focus narrowed to blocking Jiya's attacks as they came faster. A puzzled look came and went on Jiya's face, maybe—

Maybe because Lucy was letting Jiya back her across the barn.

She was going to be in trouble in a minute or two. She either had to counterattack, or— or do something else.

When she parried Jiya's next blow, she let the momentum carry her into a feint. Jiya rocked back in her block, and Lucy just kept moving sideways, circling Jiya. Now she had a lot more of the barn to back up across.

Garcia and Wyatt were always watching intently whenever they entered her field of view. How long did they intend this to go on?

Jiya was striking fast now. Lucy struggled to block every blow. The second half of a one-two punch startled her; she barely got out of the way, and Jiya clipped her in the shoulder. She stumbled back. But Garcia had taught her well: her feet and hands moved almost on their own, keeping her in a defensible position.

They crossed the floor again. This time Jiya was expecting Lucy's little dodge-out-of-the-corner move, but Lucy dodged in the other direction from her feint. It took longer. She needed a better strategy.

Next time she saw them, Garcia and Wyatt were looking at each other. She couldn't interpret their expressions. She blocked another blow—

"Pause," Wyatt called.

Jiya and Lucy looked at him.

"Lucy? Can I talk to you?"

Feeling embarrassed, childish, but also a little defiant, she followed him outside. She remembered the days when she wouldn't have worried about what he wanted to talk about, and felt a pang of bitterness.

They faced each other. "Is everything okay?" he asked.

"It's not any more  _not_ okay than it was this morning."

He grimaced, acknowledging the truth of that. "You're not throwing any strikes."

"I don't—" She looked at him, wishing he understood, and saw in his expression the patience and camaraderie that she remembered, from— before. That, too, caused her a wistful pang. "I don't want to hurt Jiya," she blurted out. "She's my friend, I don't—"

"I know," he said, and looking at him, she could see that he  _did_ know. He got it. That felt like the lifting of a weight she hadn't known she was carrying, and  _he_ felt familiar in a way he hadn't in a long time.

"You don't want to hurt anyone," he added. "But you're not gonna hurt Jiya if you try to hit her. You'll be  _helping_ her."

"Wyatt—"

"If you never attack, she can't practice defending."

Oh. ... huh. Oh.

"That's why we wanted you two to fight together. To test each other."

"Okay," she said after a minute. "I'll try to think about it that way."

He started to clap her on the shoulder, hesitated a second, and did it anyway. "Your form looks good," he added as they went inside. "Flynn's not the worst teacher."

"Thanks ever so much, Wyatt," Garcia drawled.

She and Jiya squared up again. Again, Lucy gave way, judging Jiya's own reactions. Where was she weak? Where was she slow?

She retreated and retreated, blocking. Then she rocked onto her front foot and slammed a solid hit over Jiya's guard, into her chest.

One of the men— Wyatt?— made a startled noise of delight.

Jiya stumbled back. Lucy dropped her guard. "Oh my God, are you—"

Jiya recovered and counterattacked. Lucy barely got her hands up in time.

Lucy ran through her repertoire, telling herself to treat it as research. As helping Jiya react quickly to something new. They traded blows. Lucy was surprised to find she was a little faster than Jiya. But when Jiya did land a punch, she hit  _hard_ .

They sped up. Had she had more brain free, Lucy would've been silently appalled to find herself sinking into the same rhythm with Jiya that she'd found first with the punching bag, and then with Garcia. It really was like dancing, except they were trying to  _hurt_ each other.

She wiped the sweat from her forehead and barely blocked another kick from Jiya. The barn echoed with their quiet grunts and growls of exertion. She couldn't keep this up forever, but it felt nothing like she'd expected it to and that really disturbed—

"Pause," Wyatt called.

Both women turned and looked at him.

"Drink something," he said. "We've already been out here a while."

Lucy grabbed her water bottle and drank, grateful for the respite. She was starting to feel it in her forearms. And her shoulders. And her thighs. And if she was feeling it now, she'd be feeling it even more in the morning.

Jiya drifted towards her, also drinking. "Hey," she said quietly. "When we go again, do you want to... go hard? Like for real?"

"What, like beat the crap out of each other?" That alley—

"No, of course not. Just... end with a bang, I guess."

Lucy hesitated. "Sure."

They squared up again. Jiya swung, hard and fast; Lucy blocked and counterattacked; and then she didn't have time to think. She could only react.

Jiya was slowly backing her across the barn. She—  _no_ . Damn it, Lucy was  _angry_ about this. She was so incompetent that even Jiya, who had just as little training as she did, could—

She had to be better than this.

She lunged. But her anger betrayed her into doing it off-balance, and Jiya landed a solid hit that forced Lucy's breath out of her. She stumbled back. Off to the side, Wyatt put a hand out to check some instinctive motion from Garcia, but she couldn't worry about that now.

She put her back foot down to regain her balance, and it came naturally to her to shift her weight onto that foot and kick with her other. She caught Jiya squarely in the thigh, sending the other woman staggering back in turn. Garcia's turn to put out a restraining hand towards Wyatt.

Lucy lunged forward, pressing her advantage— pressing, for the first time, Jiya backwards.

It almost seemed like Jiya just couldn't think fast enough to turn the tide. Lucy didn't intend to let her change that. Though what she would do once she had  _Jiya_ trapped against the wall— She could just, you know, stop and say "Good match," right?

Suddenly, Lucy was airborne.

She landed in something soft and prickly. The force knocked the wind out of her. She had a stunned, confused impression of voices and movement. "Lucy?"

"Nnngh." She rolled over. Someone pulled her to sitting. When she managed to open her eyes, the someone was Jiya.

"That, um... I didn't expect that to work quite like that," Jiya said. Garcia and Wyatt were right behind her.

"It's okay," Lucy managed. "I'm fine. I wanna know how you did that."

"I taught her." Now that he saw she was all right, Wyatt's startled look of concern faded into pride. "Good trick to use when you're the little guy in a fight." He tilted his head towards Garcia. "I've even used something similar on him."

Garcia looked down at Wyatt. "It's true. Wyatt can teach you more than I can about being  _the little guy in a fight_ ."

Wyatt gave him a pointed look, then said, "That's definitely enough for today. You'll be feeling it tomorrow."

"Bold of you to assume we're not feeling it now," Jiya muttered, helping Lucy stand.

"Oh, I'm not assuming anything."

"Great."

"Ice and ibuprofen are gonna be your two best friends."

Hot water would be even better,  _if_ they lived somewhere the heat index wasn't a hundred and twenty. "In my m— mmm." Lucy swallowed, and tried again. "In the house where I grew up," she said carefully, "there's an enormous bathtub upstairs. My..." She hesitated. "My sister and I used to play in it when we were kids, and... when I got older it was the best thing for sore muscles."

Was the house empty, now? Was some branch of Rittenhouse they hadn't even encountered yet using it as a base? What would  _happen_ to it? Mom had owned it, but there were the property taxes, and...

Suddenly and vividly, she remembered the last time she'd been there. She gasped. Running for the door— Mom grabbing her with strength Lucy hadn't even known she— snatching for something,  _anything_ to use against her own mother— the vase, the wine bottle— Mom pinning her against the island— the desperate struggle— and then— a needle prick—

"Lucy?"

They were all staring at her with concern. Wyatt put a hesitant hand on her shoulder.

"I— I'm fine," she managed.

None of the stares changed appreciably.

"You guys go inside, I... just want to sit by the creek for a minute."

The other three exchanged looks. "You sure?" Wyatt sounded doubtful.

"Yep. Positive." She gave them a bright smile.

Garcia touched his tongue to his top lip, then held something out to her: his water bottle, nearly full. She took it gratefully, then headed down the path in the opposite direction before anyone could say anything else.

She planted herself on the sun warmed rock and stared at the water. Rufus. Amy. Was it weird to also grieve... a concept? Like, the entire life she'd thought she had?

She buried her face in her knees, and had the silent cry she needed. It left her feeling tired and empty, as crying usually did. She wasn't sure it helped much in any other way. There was no chance she'd one day discover  _that_ had been fake... unlike most of the rest of her life.

After a while she got up and headed up the path. There was work to do at the house and she wasn't doing anyone any good out here. It was that simple.

She was startled to see Garcia sitting against the barn, long legs stretched out in the grass. How long had he been there? He didn't look impatient. Thoughtful, rather.

He looked up, and studied her for a minute. "You gonna be all right?" he asked hesitantly.

She closed her eyes, and nodded slowly.

He echoed her nod, and got to his feet. They walked the rest of the way to the house together.

#

When she came in from the bathroom, that night, Garcia was sitting on the edge of his bed, reading. Lucy sat down on her cot, and drew her knees up to her chest.

"Are you," she began, and then hesitated.

He looked up.

"Upset at how I did? With Jiya?"

He looked at her, confused. "No." He searched her expression. "You thought I would be?" That idea seemed to disturb him.

She shrugged.

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want to attack."

"You still held your own," he pointed out. "And I know you wouldn't hold back if you were fighting Rittenhouse. Besides, you could say  _I_ did a bad job by not pushing you to be more aggressive."

"Why would anyone say that? That's stupid."

He raised his eyebrows, eloquently, and went back to his book.

"Wyatt told me he knew I didn't want to hurt anyone," she blurted out after a minute. "But that's not true."

Garcia looked up again.

"Garcia, I want to hurt Emma. I  _want_ to  _hurt_ her."

He was still for a moment. Then he put the book on the dresser and regarded her thoughtfully. "What do you want me to say, Lucy?" he asked after a minute. "'Congratulations, you're human?'"

Lucy looked at him. She'd gotten used to him having so many answers for her, on this strange and painful path she was walking. She'd gotten used to having him to— guide her. She shouldn't have assumed he'd have an answer here, too.

"She's taken so much from you," he added. "I'd be more surprised if you  _didn't_ want to hurt her."

"She's taken so much from me and it's personal," Lucy muttered. "She enjoys it."

He didn't say anything.

"But I want— I want her to  _suffer_ ." The words sounded terrible coming out of her mouth, but he should know the worst about her. "She begged for her life in that alley and I pulled the trigger anyway. And all I regret is that the gun was empty." 

"Well, that explains why she tried to beat you to death."

"What do you mean?"

"She hates you, Lucy—"

"I know. It's— it's personal. I don't know why."

"My guess is that, ah, Rittenhouse made her do terrible things to prove her loyalty. And then you show up and you're accepted without having to sacrifice any of your humanity. Without having to struggle."

"That would explain 1918," Lucy said softly after a minute. "She made me— no. She didn't  _make_ me." She looked up at him. "She ordered me to kill a wounded, defenseless man, and— and I did."

He looked steadily back at her.

"And... she enjoyed that."

"She hates you," he said after a minute, "and you saw her in a moment of weakness. Begging for her life. Begging  _you_ for her life. She wouldn't have been able to take that."

"So she'll continue to want to beat me to death," Lucy muttered. "Great."

"That's why you're learning, Lucy."

She looked at him.

He licked his lips. "Now that you know you have this inside of you," he said quietly. "You can try to ignore it... or you can accept that it's there. Use it."

_I don't_ want _to accept anything about this_ . "... use it how?"

"Turn your anger into another weapon." She could barely hear him. "If you control it, and not the other way around, it'll focus you. It'll fuel you when you need it. Keep you going when you can't draw on anything else. When you've forgotten  _why_ you started fighting, and... you're ready to give up."

She looked at him and saw, for the first time in a long time, the methodical killer, driven by the pain of grief to his breaking point, who had hounded them through time. And then her vision seemed to shift, and she saw the man who gently, painstakingly tried so hard to help her in this place where she did not want to be.

The combination of the two was jarring. And yet... and yet.

She looked again, really  _looked_ , and saw the man he was without any of this exterior shitshow. "You learned that long before Rittenhouse," she said quietly.

He didn't flinch from that. He was silent for a moment or two. "I went off to fight, that first time," he said slowly, "so angry, that..." He paused. "Either I was going to master it or it was going to kill me."

She'd had the thought before, but this time it struck her with visceral immediacy: Garcia deserved so much better than he had gotten in life.

They were both quiet for a bit.

"Thank you," she said suddenly. "This would... be a lot harder alone."

Which he knew, because he'd lived that.

"I know," he said. "That's why I'm here."

A long silence. Awkward? Profound? Loaded? All of those?

"Do you want the light on?" he asked abruptly.

"Uh— uh, no." She quickly stretched out, and closed her eyes. "'night."

#

"You know," Jiya told Lucy, speaking loudly enough to be heard around the Lifeboat, "sometimes lately I feel that this would all make a really inspiring recovery montage, set to something upbeat with a strong bass line."

"That's... good," Lucy ventured after a minute.

It was true. Connor and Wyatt's mini machine shop was making her life a lot easier. The experimentation necessary to get the Time Warp working would've been excruciating without some kind of on-site fabrication. She was very grateful.

Flynn was recovering, helping out with whatever Jiya demanded, and continuing to teach her to shoot. She knew he was still teaching Lucy to shoot  _and_ to spar. He and Wyatt would never be best friends, but at least they could be in the same room together again without everyone else bracing themselves for the inevitable explosion.

Wyatt still brooded. He often disappeared after dinner, wandering the woods, and didn't come back until late. But he checked first if he was needed, and the rest of the time, when he was there, he was  _there_ . Not a million miles away, not an ominously grouchy damper on all their spirits. The recycling stopped filling up with beer bottles, and the levels in the liquor bottles dropped only infinitesimally.

Jiya wrenched open a metal panel and stared at the mess of corrosion and disintegration inside. It was a wonder the Lifeboat had made it back at all. In her head, the inspiring montage buffered.

"And other times," she sighed, "I feel like the real soundtrack should be Yakkety Sax."

Lucy and Wyatt had only achieved detente. That grieved Jiya, because they were the remains of the original, core team. But she couldn't do anything about it, and if they could, they weren't.

Worst of all, she wasn't making much headway on the Time Warp. She couldn't decide if it needed someone smarter, or harder working... and wasn't sure which possibility made her feel worse.

She growled, wriggling out from under the Lifeboat. She swore when her hair caught on something sharp. She always pulled it back, but it worked its way loose. She tugged. Damn it, stuck fast. She tried to feel out the problem with her fingers, but her brain was too stupid today to do it.

A memory came unasked, of Rufus lying tangled around her in bed, twining her hair around his fingers. She stuffed it in the bulging drawer marked "examine later." "A little help?" she called.

Lucy's shoes approached. Her face came into view. She paled when she saw the problem. She took a slow breath and steeled herself. "... okay. Okay."

Flynn suddenly appeared. "I'll get it."

Lucy retreated hastily and with relief.

"I didn't know you were down here," Jiya said.

"Mason sent me to test the fit of the new navigational... thing. He made half a dozen prototypes." Flynn eased his way to where Jiya was stuck. He had even less clearance than she did, but it didn't seem to bother him. "Looks like we'll have to cut it all off."

"You don't want me having a sharp object right now, Flynn."

He smirked at her, then easily untangled the caught strands. He was still using his right arm cautiously, but this gave him no problem. "There." He extricated himself, then turned to see if Jiya needed help, but she was an old hand at getting out from under the Lifeboat.

"Thanks." She scraped her sweaty hair back from her forehead and hung her head back to put in a sloppy braid. Then she walked a little stiffly over to the small fridge, easing tight muscles as she went, and drained a canteen of iced tea. She was learning to pace herself.

Well, that, and the ominous burning sensation she'd started feeling when she peed had warned her that dehydration led to worse things than headaches. No, thank you.

She headed to the workbench, considering what she'd seen under there.

"What is it?" Lucy asked.

"The backup grav compensator feedback system is completely gone."

"How long does that take to fix?"

"A day,  _if_ nothing goes wrong."

"Were any of the other systems that bad?"

"No, but I saw bones. Something must've nested in there." She started gathering tools with one hand and sketching the repair with her right.

Flynn climbed into the Lifeboat with the parts in one hand. The weather had somehow turned even hotter and stickier, so Flynn and Wyatt had taken to wearing those thin tank tops that seemed ubiquitous in mens' wardrobes. Jiya didn't blame them. It was already hard enough to stay cool. Nor was she objecting. Neither man was exactly hard on the eyes, even if her appreciation was strictly aesthetic.

But once in a while she'd have a vision of Rufus, here and similarly dressed, and  _that_ appreciation was a  _hell_ of a lot more than aesthetic.

She  _missed_ him. With all of her. Heart, mind, body. She missed everything about him. It would be an all-consuming ache if she let it, and she was terrified to find out what would happen if she ever gave in to it.

She snapped back to herself. Her right hand was now writing equations. Interesting. Interesting. The feedback system momentarily forgotten, she frowned and pulled the pad closer.

She looked up when Denise came down the ladder. "Oh, hey. When did you get here?"

Denise gave her a strange look. "About two hours ago." She nodded to the pad. "Any luck?"

Jiya looked down, processing what she'd written. "I thought I'd had a breakthrough, but apparently I've just been moving constants around for two hours." She looked away so she didn't have to see Denise's expression.

"You'll get it," Denise said quietly behind her.

Jiya stared at the far wall of the cave. "I'm starting to think that's not true."

She heard Denise come closer. "You're one of the best in the world at what you do."

She decided Denise, whose family they'd saved, could be trusted with Jiya's tears. Trusted to know what they meant and what they didn't. "I  _am_ one of the best in the world at what I do. But this  _isn't what I do_ ." She wiped her tears away.

Denise handed her a tissue. "Is there anyone we can bring in?" she asked after a minute.

Jiya was desperate enough to think it through though she'd done so before and already knew the answer. "They're all either dead, or could be Rittenhouse." She sighed. "It's like I need to have Rufus back to help me get Rufus back."

"I'll ask Connor if Rufus might have had notes anywhere that survived. Like a lab notebook."

After all this time? Jiya shrugged. "It's a long shot, but it can't hurt. Thanks."

Denise nodded. "Do you want company, or do you want to be left alone?"

"The second one, I think. Sorry."

Denise shook her head. "Let me know if you need anything."

"Um... actually."

Denise looked at her.

"Could you give me a ride to Gainesville?"

"Gainesville?"

"Maybe I just need a change of scenery."

"You're not going alone. It's too dangerous with Rittenhouse out there."

Jiya crossed her arms over her chest. "I need  _out_ ," she said. "You can let me to go Gainesville for a few hours and have a break from— all this." She gestured comprehensively, and she meant it to include her teammates. "Or I can sneak out. Your choice."

Denise's mouth tightened. "Do you realize how much is at stake with you as our  _only_ pilot?"

Jiya laughed. "Do I realize? How could I  _not_ realize? What exactly do you think is keeping me up all these nights?"

Well, that and thirteen other things.

Denise's expression softened. She watched Jiya for a long moment. "What about the day after tomorrow?" she asked, more gently.

Jiya hadn't expected that to be so easy. "Um. Okay! I'll replace the feedback system tomorrow, then." She paused. "Um, thanks."

Denise gave her a stern look. "I'm betting heavily on the assumption that if you can take care of yourself for three years in the nineteenth century, you can take care of yourself anywhere. Please don't prove me wrong."

"I won't."

Denise nodded, and started for the ladder.

"... Denise?"

The older woman looked back, patiently and faintly amused.

"Did Lucy cook tonight?"

"I... think so? I brought groceries—"

Jiya shook her head. "Was it any good?"

Denise eyed her. "Is this... important?"

"Very."

"I didn't smell any smoke, or hear any complaints."

Jiya smiled.

"Do you want me to bring you something?"

"I'm not hungry, but thanks."

Denise looked at her, possibly trying to figure out if Jiya had been all of a sudden bodysnatched and replaced with a robot with buggy programming. Finally, she just climbed the ladder.

#

It was hot, that night, and she kept dreaming of Rufus's dead body. Thinking of all she had to do to get him back threatened to crush her. After a few hours, she gave up on sleep and climbed down to the Batcave.

So when Denise was ready to leave for Gainesville, Jiya was exhausted, but clear-minded. Denise didn't really try to talk. Jiya was grateful. She stared out the window, fascinated by the scenery despite herself. If nothing else, it was new. She'd piloted the Lifeboat from the bunker to the barn, so she hadn't seen anything beyond their immediate surroundings. But she had to admit it was kind of pretty, with rolling hills, pine trees, and the occasional clear river.

The Confederate flags, she could have done without.

"You sure you know where you're going?" Denise gave her a concerned look when they got to town. "I should have asked one of our soldiers to come."

That was the  _last_ thing Jiya needed. "We agreed I would go alone, and you like me too much to stick me with either of them in a day that might involve some shopping." She was pretty sure it wouldn't, actually, but she didn't mind throwing Denise off the scent.

"If anything seems wrong, and I mean  _anything_ —"

"Run and hide and run again. I know. I got pretty good at it."

"Run and hide and  _call me_ . You're not on your own any more."

Jiya managed a smile. "I know."

"All right." Denise unlocked the door. "I'll be back in a few hours."

Jiya went into the public library, browsed the new arrivals, and waited until she was pretty sure Denise was gone. She'd done her homework, and had Denise drop her a few blocks from a tattoo parlor with a reputation for cleanliness. Artistic merit, not so much, but she wasn't asking for anything fancy.

The artist looked dubious when Jiya explained what she wanted, where. "That's gonna hurt like a bitch," she said bluntly. "This your first?"

"Yes. And I don't care about the pain."

It did, in fact, sting like hell. In a weird way, Jiya was grateful for a new distraction. Besides, she'd had worse in the 19 th century.

Oh, God. Was this what she was becoming? A grim, world-weary soldier who looked at the pain of getting tattooed as a  _relief_ ?

"Done," the artist finally said. She handed Jiya a mirror so she could see more easily, and cleaned up.

Jiya studied it. Nodded.

After the artist had explained how to care for the site, Jiya still hadn't gotten a call or text from Denise. Should that worry her?

Right now, it meant more freedom. So she went for a walk. It was steamy and sticky and  _gross_ , and the area wasn't pedestrian-friendly, or scenic, with wide roads and undeveloped lots separating squat buildings from each other. Still a nice change from the house.

She ended up in a secondhand store, mostly for the sake of its air conditioning, and wandered the dusty disorganized aisles. The cashier, a middle-aged white dude who was reading a Harlequin paperback and absentmindedly stroking an enormous tabby cat in between occasional bored glances around the store, was the only other person there.

Jiya considered a copy of  _Dune._ But money couldn't buy her the time to read, or an attention span unaddled by grief and worry. She considered longer over a talking Yoda candy dispenser. Rufus would have loved it. But— sitting in the corner of her little room, gathering dust, would it just sadden her? 

Regretfully, she moved on.

She was about to leave when she saw the little box at the back of a shelf about waist-height. She caught her breath at the beauty of its contents.

She wanted it. But she knew exactly what it was. Did she have the audacity?

She stood there for a while. No. She didn't. But she would have had, once, and she wanted to be more like that person again.

She picked it up and started for the counter. She doubled back for Yoda.

Denise picked her up about fifteen minutes later at a fast food place down the street. She cast an interested professional eye over Jiya's shopping bag, but all she said was, "Lunch?"

Jiya thought Denise meant the fast food restaurant. In fact, Denise took her to a little hole-in-the-wall "Middle Eastern" place in yet another strip mall, and stuffed her. Jiya was indifferent for about two bites. Then she noticed how  _right_ the food tasted, like summer afternoons with her grandmother twenty years ago— ah, the last name on the menu was Lebanese, that made sense. Plus, she hadn't eaten well for— well, she didn't know how long.

The cook ended up coming out to see the two small women who were putting away so much food, and gave them dessert on the house. The teenaged waiter— the cook's son or nephew, Jiya thought— brought them boxes when they eventually had to concede. Jiya practically waddled out to the car.

"Better?" Denise asked with a faint smile.

Jiya considered. "Actually," she said. "Yeah. Thank you."  _For driving me. For trusting me enough not to ask where. For getting me out of there._

"You're welcome."

So Jiya returned to the Sauna with a tender new tattoo, a full belly, a jewelry box, Yoda, and a tarnished, battered, tattered, but nevertheless partially replenished supply of hope. That night she pulled up her shirt in front of the bathroom mirror, and looked.

There it was, as close to her heart as possible considering, you know, boobs. Still red, and she had to read it backwards, of course:

_The only way out is through._

#

"Amy was a black belt," Lucy blurted out, after she threw an over-enthusiastic kick at Garcia, nearly fell over, and managed to recover.

She wiped a tiny fraction of the sweat from her face. "Which suggests that I got the clumsy gene from Benjamin Cahill, so that's one more thing to blame Rittenhouse for."

Small potatoes in comparison to everything else. But she was so frustrated with her slow progress learning to fight back that she had to make light of it, or... Well, she had to make light of it.

Garcia made a non-committal noise.

Had Amy been in the journal? She hadn't yet asked him. She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer. She looked down, and scuffed her shoe across the barn floor.

When she looked up, Garcia was moving his right arm gingerly, and grimacing.

His face went instantly blank when he saw her watching, but she'd seen. "Okay, we're done."

"Lucy, I'm fine."

"Garcia, don't insult my intelligence." It came out more snappish than she intended. "You realize  _none_ of us believe any of the rest of us when we use that word any more, right?"

"I have noticed it's one of your favorites, yes."

She gave him a Look. "We're done," she repeated. "I'm not having you hurt yourself just to train me." She opened the little cooler and handed him one canteen.

"Thanks."

She took the other for herself. It was deliciously cold on her hands. She pressed it to her forehead, then to each side of her face, then to her neck, the condensation a welcome shock. She tilted her head back and let it rest against her pulse point. She groaned softly at the sheer relief, the straight-up sensual delight, of the cold.

She looked up. Garcia was watching her with—

She'd never before seen that look of open, helpless desire on anyone's face when they were looking at  _her_ , but God help her, she recognized it just the same.

His gaze leapt away like she'd shocked him. Stunned, she dropped her own gaze, and nearly dropped the bottle as she tried to get the top off. She felt hot all over. He couldn't— he  _couldn't_ have been looking at  _her_ that way. Not her, Lucy Preston, clumsy historian, sweaty and disheveled from an hour of fighting, in an old T-shirt and soft shorts.

Except she'd seen his  _face_ .

If not for the faint flush on his face now, she would have been completely convinced she'd imagined the whole thing. As it was, she was still mostly convinced.

But— but what if—

"Good work," he said abruptly. His face was back to normal, but his voice was a little rough. "Tomorrow?"

Her thoughts were going fast as her heart, but much less productively. She nodded.

He made no move to leave. Neither did she.

"... Garcia?"

"I'm going to, ah, shower."

"Oh!" Right. The solar shower, that he and Wyatt both used most of the time to— to keep the inside bathroom from being too crowded— He didn't want to— With her right there— It was  _sheltered_ , of course, not right out in the open, but he still was waiting for her to—

The thought of him showering on the other side of the wall, as she sat in here, overloaded her brain. "Rightthanksbye!"

Only Connor's quick reaction prevented her from slamming into him at the front door. He steadied her by her shoulders. "You all right, Lucy?"

"Um... yeah."

"You're all pink. You sure you didn't get overheated with Flynn?"

"I'm fine."

He didn't look convinced, but he continued: "I was coming to find you, actually. I need some help."

"Shower first." She just— needed— a minute.

She got away from Connor, grabbed some clothes, locked the door behind her, and basically had to peel out of her workout clothes. She'd throw in a load of laundry after her shower. Garcia would probably still be—

Noooooooope. Her mind was a little too interested in imagining that. She yanked it right off that track.

Clean, clothed, and somewhat more collected, she found Connor after starting the washing machine. "What?"

"C'mere, I want you to try something."

"What?"

But he only guided her downstairs and seated her at—

The simulator.

"Is this... a joke?"

"We could use a backup pilot." His expression was open, and sad, and serious in a way that deeply disturbed her.

"I'm  _not_ a physicist, Connor. I'm just about the farthest thing you could  _get_ from a physicist."

"No, but you're very,  _very_ smart. And, with all due respect... your mother wouldn't exactly have encouraged you to develop any talents that  _didn't_ lie in the way of history, now would she?"

"I studied anthropology too," Lucy retorted reflexively. It didn't sound like much. But she'd had many fights with Mom over it to get her own way and be left alone.

Connor didn't say anything.

This—

She remembered watching Lifeboat Lucy and Wyatt climb out of their Lifeboat. There had very clearly been no one else inside. So... was this, too, her future? Did she become a pilot?

Amy and Wyatt, at different times, had told her startlingly similar things:  _make your own future_ . But these days, she felt less and less able to do that.

"I just want to test your physics  _aptitude_ ," he said. "Call it a hunch."

"Just show me what I'm doing," she muttered, turning her back on Connor.

"We'll start with the very abbreviated version..."

That was still two grueling hours of tests that made Lucy's head spin. The  _only_ thing that kept her from walking off was Jiya's feet sticking out of the Lifeboat as she ran some kind of system test. If there was any possibility that, by learning this, Lucy could ease Jiya's burden, then... what right did she have to say no?

"All right, that's the end of that," Connor announced, coming up behind her. "I'll look this over and—"

"Great." Lucy was already halfway to the trapdoor. The far trapdoor, the one into the barn. She wanted to be alone right now.

"— let you know," Connor called after her.

She heard voices as she climbed. She nearly turned back, but— it had to be Garcia and Wyatt, and she could detour around them and go to the creek. She pushed open the trapdoor—

— and saw Garcia throw a punch at Wyatt's head.

She practically levitated up the remaining rungs of the ladder as Wyatt blocked. She skidded to a stop between the two men. "What the  _hell?_ " she demanded, furious, staring up at Garcia, hands out, but low, in case she needed to— 

Where had this even  _come_ from? And—

She half-turned.

... and why were they both staring at  _her_ like she was a creature from outer space?

"Lucy?" Wyatt asked. "Is everything okay?"

"You fighting each other is  _never_ okay. No. Whatever problems you have, you—"

"Lucy," Wyatt said, "we're sparring."

A slow but inexorable sense that she'd made a giant ass out of herself crept up on her. She glanced at Garcia. He was trying not to laugh.

"Oh," Lucy said brightly. "I'll just, uh. Leave you to it. Sorry." She stepped out of the way. "And quietly run away to Patagonia," she muttered under her breath.

"It's dead winter there right now," Garcia told her, mouth mostly solemn. "I don't think you'd like it very much."

But Wyatt wasn't amused. He wasn't upset, either. Surprised? He just staring at her—

_Really, Wyatt? You think I'd just stand back and let him go after you?_

She gave him a sad look, and for a moment, it seemed like there was more distance between them than ever.

Then she remembered: "Didn't you hurt yourself this morning?" she added to Garcia.

"Which is why I'm leading with my left. That way it might actually be a fair match."

Wyatt made a disgusted noise. "Don't worry, Lucy," he said, in an unconvincingly light tone. "I'll leave him mostly intact for you."

Okay. That was  _definitely_ enough of that. She turned, marched past the machine shop and out of the barn, and headed for the creek.

#

Lucy did not actually have screaming nightmares. _Screaming_ would mean enough noise to disturb or downright inconvenience others, and she had apparently learned somewhere back near the dawn of her own existence that to inconvenience someone on her own behalf was a cardinal sin.

Carol Preston had a lot to answer for.

No, Lucy had... choking nightmares. Whimpering nightmares. Little-horrified-pleading-noises nightmares.

He lay still and listened for a minute, because she— in accordance with the Lucy Doctrine of Quiet Selfless Immolation— would be ridiculously, pointlessly upset to know she'd woken him. And if she might fall into an undisturbed sleep— well, she needed it.

But her noises of distress did not taper off. "Lucy," he said, firm but low.

Lucy moaned, soft and frightened, but didn't wake.

"Lucy?"

When she still didn't wake, he slid out of bed and knelt by her cot. Prepared on the off-chance she came up fighting, he shook her shoulder. "Lucy—"

She woke with a jerk, saw him, and shrank back against the wall with a terrified little yelp.

He just about teleported back to his side of the room, keeping his hands open and where she could see them. God, the fear fading from her eyes cut him to the bone, but it was no less than he deserved, and his own feelings weren't what mattered right now.

"It's all right," he said, low and soothing as he could. "You're all right, Lucy. You're safe."  _And you decided I wasn't a monster a while ago_ . "Do you know where you are?"

Gaze still fixed on his face, she nodded.

"Okay. I'm gonna go sleep on the couch." Staying as far from her as he could— he knew how big he was, the last thing she needed was him looming over her— he slid to the end of the bed—

"Garcia, you don't need to—"

God. Was there some kind of, some kind of  _camp_ they could send her to, for re-education and rehabilitation, to teach her it was okay to think of herself? It would be almost funny if it weren't so sad.

"Lucy." He looked at her in disbelief. "We both know what just happened. I'm not gonna make you sleep in the same room with—"  _The monster you just dreamed about_ . If he said that, she would, of course, immediately focus on convincing him he was wrong. "— what you dreamed about."

He reached for the door, yanked it open when it stuck, and slipped out before she could invent new protests.

He didn't sleep immediately. He lay on the couch and listened a while to make sure the noises didn't start again. But either she was sleeping quietly, or not at all.

It was sticky as hell out here. This was what she'd been putting up with before she moved in with him?

... that  _horror_ in her face. But he'd earned every bit of it, and then more. He should've been surprised this hadn't happened a long time ago.

Because he, unlike her, was a heartless bastard, once he decided it was okay to sleep again, it didn't take him long.

He made himself scarce the next morning. He showered outside the barn and took his breakfast downstairs, where Jiya, looking exhausted as ever, was, as ever, working. He gave her a hand for a while, then wandered back up to the barn to see what help Mason needed.

Lucy found him there mid-morning. He looked up and there she was, standing hesitantly in the doorway, drinking iced tea. He still had no idea how she stood the taste of that stuff.

She offered him a tentative smile, because—  _of course_ he was the one she was concerned about. Of course.

"Garcia, about last—"

"Lucy, if you try to apologize for anything, I think I'm gonna throw myself in the creek."

That got a breath of surprised laughter out of her, and her smile reached her eyes, like— the sun coming out of the clouds. "No, it's just—"

She considered him thoughtfully, the hesitancy gone from her expression. "You're consistently one of the most considerate people in my life, now," she said finally. "And I have no idea how that happened, but I'm glad it did."

_Yeah, kidnappings and threats were not the most ideal of beginnings, were they?_ He hadn't expected her to say anything like what she just had, and it took him a moment to recover. "If you, ahhhh, see the White Rabbit, give him my regards."

She gave him that look of  _you're ridiculous and I'm secretly fond of it_ .

It wasn't a very well-kept secret. He hadn't told her that.

"Are we sparring today?" she asked.

"Do you  _want_ to spar today?"

"Yes," she told him calmly. She ruined it a minute later by wrinkling her nose and adding, "or at least I don't want it less than any other morning."

"Fine. Get changed and we'll meet back here."

#

"Jiya?"

Jiya sat up, hit her head on the Lifeboat with a painful  _thud_ , swore, and scowled. "What?" she snapped. The echoes of the Batcave had distorted the voice, but whoever it was, yes, of course she was down here. What else would she be fucking doing?

She wriggled out from under the Lifeboat and waited resentfully. Lucy came around the Lifeboat, her bare feet barely making any noise. "Hey," she said quietly. "I brought you some supper."

Jiya transferred her scowl to the tray in Lucy's hands— she'd dug up and used an actual  _tray_ , like Jiya was an invalid. "That's sweet, but also kind of patronizing." She managed not to growl. "If I were hungry, I would've come up."

Lucy looked taken aback. Jiya felt like she'd kicked a puppy. "Oh," she said. "I guess I just— figured you might be like me."

"You, like me, are an adult who can self-regulate," Jiya pointed out.

Lucy shook her head. "I have a bad habit of getting so wrapped up in my work I don't notice anything else. I'll... suddenly be light-headed and have to pee and have a wicked dehydration headache and be wondering why, and then I'll see that four hours have passed without my noticing."

Jiya unbent far enough to say, "Sounds like one of my marathon coding sessions." Then she realized what she'd just—

But Lucy didn't turn that into an  _aha!_ "My mom used to nag me about it. I guess... I guess she was patronizing too."

Okay, if Jiya hadn't been sure this was just Lucy's normal self-deprecation, she would've been pissed, because that awesome verbal jiu jitsu move put Jiya in the position of having compared Lucy to  _Carol Preston_ . And Jiya would  _never_ do that.

"Look, I know you're trying to help," she sighed. "I'm  _not_ hungry, but I— ... is that birthday cake?"

"The last piece."

"I thought it was all gone."

"I hid it."

Jiya pulled the tray towards her. "I'll eat this if you help me out." Lucy had brought her both a fork and a spoon, so it would work.

"I don't—"

"Oh? You wanna look me in the eye and tell me  _you're_ eating enough square meals a day?"

Lucy avoided eye contact.

"Diiiiidn't think so."

They ate in a tired quiet. Lucy had discovered cold pasta salads, which, whatever Jiya might think of them as a cultural  _concept_ , were, well, cold. And filling. And Lucy managed to avoid the cardinal sin of drowning everything in dressing, so they weren't even bad.

Also, they were vegetarian by default. She hadn't had a choice about eating meat in the 19 th century, but now that she was back home? It was good not to be putting dead things in her mouth on a regular basis.

"You're cooking's getting better," she offered, and then realized how that sounded. She winced. "I mean. Um—"

Lucy just smiled. "Thanks."

It struck Jiya that Lucy looked even wearier and more dispirited than their depressing new normal.  _Are you okay_ was an asinine question right now. "How are you?" she blurted.

Lucy looked surprised. She visibly started to pull herself together and give some kind of reassuring lie, but then she just kind of... crumpled, not having the energy. "I'm here," she said finally.

And wasn't  _that_ a low bar.

"What about you?" Lucy asked gently.

"Pretty shitty."

"I'm sorry."

Jiya shrugged. Like... like 'pretty shitty' was  _news_ ?

"Do you want a hug?"

Jiya almost snapped at her, and then realized— "Actually, I'd love a hug."

Lucy gave good hugs: not too loose and awkward, not too tight and strangling. Solid, comforting,  _there_ . Jiya often forgot, and she wasn't sure  _how_ , that Lucy had been a big sister.

They pulled away. "Can I show you something?" Jiya asked suddenly.

"Of course."

"Okay, it's going to look like I'm flashing you, but—" Jiya reached for the hem of her shirt. Lucy's eyebrows went up. "No, really. This is more than my Bourbon Street impression." She pulled up her shirt.

Lucy's expression went from puzzled to impressed. And solemn? "When'd you have that done?"

"When Denise took me to Gai—"

"Hey, Jiya, Connor and I made these new coupl—... I am so sorry I'll come back."

It happened so fast that Wyatt was already going from 0 to 60 in reverse up the ladder by the time Jiya processed the interruption and dropped her shirt.

She didn't actually... care. She'd known she was sitting out in a common area, and besides— she'd been living with these people for months, there'd been plenty of awkward accidental moments like that. She'd once gotten full view of Wyatt's bare ass in the shower, and wow, that was not a memory she needed. Watching him scurry up the ladder was far more satisfying.

Lucy, who'd looked over her shoulder at the voice, looked back. Jiya caught her eye and snickered.

"Took me to Gainesville," Jiya finished between giggles. "Pretty impulsive for such a—" She snorted, still thinking of the look of horror on Wyatt's face. "A permanent thing, but... hey."

"No, it's nice. I like it. It... it's appropriate."

"And whatever happens, it always will be."

Jiya had just taken the last bite— Lucy had pleaded being full, which Jiya suspected as a ploy to get Jiya herself to eat more— when the trap door banged open. A pause, then heavy footsteps on the ladder. "Wyatt said you needed these urgently and I should announce myself loudly first." Flynn sounded irked and bewildered as he descended the ladder. "Also, he looked horrified." Familiar contempt there.

Jiya couldn't help it. She started laughing hysterically.

Flynn looked from one of them to the other, perhaps wondering if he ought to be concerned.

"Jiya flashed him," Lucy explained matter-of-factly.

Jiya, on the verge of getting herself under control, lost it again.

Flynn looked between the two of them as if wondering if he ought to be concerned it was  _catching_ . He set a plastic bag on top of the fridge and left without another word.

God, Jiya had forgotten how  _good_ it felt to laugh that hard. She wiped her eyes. "Is that... going okay?" she asked after a minute. "Rooming with him?"

Lucy gave her a tired look that— wait, was that how Jiya looked when people asked her a lot of things lately?

"I'm not assuming it's not," Jiya said carefully. "But... you don't tell people when you're not okay."

Lucy looked at her, thoughtful and maybe touched. "Yeah. It's good."

"If it's ever not—  _if_ — we can share again."

"I don't want to take your space."

"You don't deserve to be stuck on the couch in perpetuity either."

"It's fine for now," Lucy said. "If that needs to change— I'll tell you. 'kay?" She stood and picked up the empty tray.

"Hey, uh. Thanks for the... everything."

Lucy smiled "Of course." Then she went back upstairs.

#

Two thirty-seven am found Jiya slumped in her pajamas on the couch, feet propped on an overturned milk crate, staring into space.

A door opened. Flynn came very quietly into the living room. Sometimes— like now, when she was really sleep-deprived— he reminded her of a big cat. A semi-feral half-bobcat whom they'd finally housebroken and gotten vaccinated and were trying to break of the habit of bringing them dead things.

Despite everything, she smiled when she saw that he was carrying two water glasses.

He gave her a curious look. But he didn't say anything, and she was grateful. He disappeared from sight; the freezer opened and closed; the kitchen tap ran; he reappeared. She got another curious look.

Of all of them, he was the only other one who knew how it felt to have your lover murdered. And so she found herself saying, "Bed's too big."

He stopped, suddenly, something far too close to understanding for Jiya's liking crossing his expression. He watched her quietly.

She raised her eyes to his face. "Does this get any easier?"

He paused. "No."

Great.

"I'm, uh, trying to think of something helpful to say," he added awkwardly, after a long pause. "But that's not  _really_ my forte."

She smiled anyway, slow and weak. "Thanks anyway."

The silence stretched out.

"I miss everything about him," she said suddenly, because something told her that Flynn might be a smartass about nearly anything else, but this— this she could trust him with.

After all, did he have room to criticize anyone  _else_ for the strength of their reactions to the death of someone loved? No, he did not.

"His stupid Star Wars jokes. His stupid Yoda voice. The way he stuck his cold hands under me at night. He had this weird habit of— smelling my  _hairbrush_ ." She let the pain of remembering sink in for a moment, for once not trying to escape from it. 

That was compounded by the pain of surprise, because—

"It's been three years, for me," she added quietly. "And I'm starting to forget."

He  _looked_ at her, his face so full of equal parts pain and a quiet  _yes, I know_ , that it frightened her. He was the only other one who could understand, but she did not welcome the thought of being closer to him. Because if he, their time-traveling killer, was more like her than she thought... what did that say about  _her_ ?

But honestly? She already knew. And it  _hurt_ . So she looked back at him. "So it— it always hurts like this."

He looked at her thoughtfully. Only now when she saw him with a different expression did she realize how often he looked grim, guarded, sarcastic, or all three. "It never... hurts less." He spoke slow and soft, his accent strong. "But slowly, the pain comes less often."

She thought about that. "I don't know if that's reassuring or scary."

"Neither do I."

He still made no move to leave. Jiya pictured her grief as a series of violent waves on a cliff, slowly stretching out, the period slowly increasing.

The waves stretching out...

"Maybe one day," Flynn began, and then stopped.

She only realized he had in fact kept speaking when he really did stop and she snapped back to the present.

"Jiya?"

It was, it was like...

He stepped forward. "Jiya."

"Right," she said. "Yes."

She pictured an object entering the water, aimed at a target, and the ripples spreading out from the object obscuring her view of the target. "Continuous perturbation. Just being linked back to the present is enough to— you have to continuously update or your own disturbance will tear you off course. Sever the link. Need a positive feedback loop." She scrambled up and tugged open the trapdoor. "Thanks Flynn!"

He was still standing in the living room, mouth open, frowning, as she clambered down the ladder. "I swear," he muttered, "every time I talk to a scientist I miss half the conversation."

#

The revelation she had while talking to Flynn wasn't the breakthrough she'd hoped. But it helped. She hammered away at the theoretical side until dawn, then started testing a very small part of what they'd need. She drafted Lucy to report on the status lights and Flynn as an extra set of hands. With some improvisation by Connor and Wyatt out in the shop when one of the parts didn't fit, they got it working by late afternoon.

"Good effort," Jiya muttered, so tired she felt dizzy. "Go, team."

"Shall I break out the pompoms?" Flynn asked, deadpan.

She shook her head. "Thanks, that's not at all a disturbing mental image."

He smirked.

The other two went upstairs. Jiya hauled herself into the Pocket to give the equations another shot— or so she thought. In reality, she fell asleep on the page after about three minutes. She woke fuzzy-headed, having drooled on her notebook. There was no inherent connection between that and Rufus, but thinking of how he would have teased her still made her heart ache.

She pushed herself doggedly back to work as people came and went below. The Batcave emptied at suppertime. Then Flynn climbed down.

"You could set an anchor underneath the trapdoor," he suggested after a while. "Keep from having to climb all the way to the floor and back."

Jiya stayed quiet and low, and was gratified by the sight of him doing a double-take and starting towards the ladder to make sure she was really there. Once she knew he knew she'd seen that, she said, "I've thought about it. A lot more obvious there, though. What would be really great would be to put a pulley in the ceiling and run another invisible line within reach of the ladder, but even for me, that's a hard anchor to set. And we don't have any real gear." His point about the consequences of her slipping had been noted.

"Still, for someone with your rock-climbing background, it shouldn't be too hard."

"Yeah, if I had the time." She was tired enough that that struck her as funny. Then she stopped grinning. "Wait. How do  _you_ know about my rock-climbing?" She'd never talked about it in front of him, and she doubted Rufus would have mentioned it.

"I surveilled everyone at Mason Industries extensively. I tailed you to your climbing gym once. You're not bad."

She shuddered. "Jeez, every time I think we've hit peak creepy Flynn, you prove me wrong."

He looked up coldly. "I could tell you the worst I've done, and then you'd stop being surprised."

"Um... no thanks."

"Wise choice."

She wrote. He fiddled. "Did Rufus climb?"

"He came with me a few times, but it wasn't really his—" She looked up. "Is this more information gathering?"

"No. I'm attempting one of your Earth customs, mak-ing con-ver-sat-ion."

Jiya snorted.

A while later, the trap door from the house opened. Jiya stayed low, but Lucy, focusing on climbing down with one hand, didn't even look up.

She reached the foot of the ladder and looked around. "Where's Jiya?"

"I'm sure she'll turn up," Flynn said. "Have you checked farther down the cave?"

Jiya watched the two of them look at each other for a moment. She couldn't see Lucy's face. Flynn looked faintly amused.

"Keep your secrets," Lucy said. "I just brought her dinner." She put the covered plate on the workbench. "She was listing to one side this afternoon, and I doubt she's eaten since."

No, Jiya hadn't.

Lucy went back upstairs. Jiya waited, then climbed down. She glanced at Flynn. "Uh... thanks." She felt a little surprised that he'd kept her secret from Lucy.

Flynn grunted.

Jiya poked at the food, then took a cautious bite. She chewed. Okay, it was... edible. Another few bites and she upgraded it to tolerable. So some of the rice was underdone and some was burnt, and it needed salt. Still better than a protein bar. Then her stomach woke up and remembered it had been empty most of the day, and she inhaled the rest.

_I can learn_ , she thought as she climbed the ladder to put her plate in the sink and use the toilet.  _That's what matters. I can learn_ .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: this chapter contains ableism and discussion of canonical decomposition. And wow, that is not a tag you use every day.
> 
> Also, Jiya’s maybe-vision was inspired by this Rogue One fan art, and another similar one that I can’t find right now: http://venrael.tumblr.com/post/154634649473


	4. Home on the Range

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma jumps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: discussion of canonical violence, vomiting

The jump alarm went off.

"January 12th, 1888," Connor told them as they hurried down the ladder. "Northern Nebraska."

The rest of them looked at Lucy.

"That's the Schoolchildrens' Blizzard," she said.

Honestly, just using the word _children_ in any conversation about Rittenhouse was alarming.

She tried to recall more details. "Uh... a warm spell in the middle of winter tempts a lot of people to go outside, and then a brutal blizzard hits in the middle of the afternoon. Out of nowhere. A lot of kids die."

"And how does even  _Rittenhouse_ make a blizzard worse?" Wyatt demanded.

"Does anyone have a narrow escape who goes on to be important?" Garcia suggested.

Lucy shook her head.

"Well," Denise said. "Go find out."

"We can't."

Everyone looked at Jiya.

"January 12 th , 1888. I was in San Francisco." She looked up at them. "Whatever Emma's got planned,  _we can't stop her_ ."

The silence that followed was appalled.

In her peripheral vision, Lucy saw Connor turn and look at her, but she steadily refused to make eye contact.

"You still need to jump." Denise was the first to recover. "Protect yourselves and the Lifeboat from whatever change is about to happen."

"If you jump back to before 1888— 1885, rather," Connor corrected himself, glancing at Jiya, "you should be safe. And, uh, here. Take this in the Lifeboat." He dug around on one of the workbenches, and handed Jiya a hard drive.

"What's this?"

"Wikipedia. I've been keeping an updated copy downloaded. When you get back, we can compare the version on the hard drive to the version on the Internet and see everything that changed."

"That's... not a bad idea," Jiya said.

"Yes, well, I do have them occasionally."

"So, any time before 1885?" Wyatt asked.

Lucy looked at him. "You have something in mind?"

"Yeah. Let's go kill Emma."

They looked at each other.

"I mean, we're not changing history, are we? She's not supposed to be there in the 19 th century to begin with."

"You're asking me to sanction an execution?" Denise asked.

"Yes." Jiya pulled her gaze back from some grim middle distance and looked at Denise. "She killed Rufus. In cold blood. He wasn't even armed."

"I had those same orders about Flynn," Wyatt pointed out after a minute. "Do we really think Emma's less destructive?"

Lucy felt that she should have objected more strongly to this plan, or at least considered it a significant step, deliberately seeking Emma out to kill her instead of just trying to stop her in the course of a mission. But... she didn't.

Her biggest concern was the practicalities. She looked at Garcia. "Do you have the coordinates of the cabin?"

"I would if I had my watch."

"So where's your watch?" Wyatt asked.

"I don't know, Agent Christopher, where  _is_ my watch?"

"Impounded with the rest of your personal effects that the government used as evidence against you."

"Great," Wyatt said. "We don't have time to break into an evidence locker. We'll have to get as close as we can from a map." He leaned over Jiya's shoulder. "Flynn, you wanna help me out here?"

Lucy watched them compare notes about 1882, interspersed with acrimony, but her mind was elsewhere. "Are we sure Emma's not going to see us coming?"

"What do you mean?" Jiya asked.

Lucy hesitated, trying to put her thoughts together. "Emma's...  _scared_ of Garcia."

Wyatt gave her a dirty look, but she was so not going there. "In the alley in Chinatown, she ran off when she heard you coming," she told Garcia.

Garcia turned around. "She was out of bullets. She didn't have a fresh magazine."

"Right, but before that? She took down an entire team of soldiers to get to the Mothership, so she probably could have taken your crew. And in 1954 you barely had anyone left anyway, but she  _still_ didn't attack you directly. She took you to blow up nearly the entire Rittenhouse  _leadership_ rather than fight you."

"She must've known they wouldn't all be there," he muttered. "Maybe she thought it would cause a power vacuum she could take advantage of."

"Lucy's got a point, though," Wyatt said after a minute. "Had you ever met her before 1882?"

"Never." Garcia licked his lips. "That I know of, yet."

They exchanged looks.

Lucy said what they were all thinking: "Maybe some future version of you went back and tried to kill her sometime when she was in Missouri."

"Well, at least you have that to look forward to," Wyatt joked.

"It doesn't work like that, Wyatt," Jiya said. "It's not a loop." She paused. "Maybe there's another explanation. Maybe Emma was an operative for the Keynes side of Rittenhouse. She wasn't concerned that all the Cahills would get wiped out. That would even make it easier for her to capture the Mothership for the Keynes side."

"Does Rittenhouse have that kind of factionalism, Lucy?" Denise asked.

Lucy did not want to think back to those six weeks. But she had to, and they were all watching her. She kept her face blank. "It wouldn't surprise me. I mean... we're talking about a gang of power-hungry megalomaniacs here." Not exactly a recipe for cordial relations. "They talked about the other members of Rittenhouse, the ones who'd been imprisoned," she added. "But they didn't seem daunted by the arrests."

"We're not gonna know if we don't try," Wyatt said. "And, hey, if we run into some future version of Flynn there, we'll... try to bring back all the pieces of this version of you."

Lucy gave him a Look. Garcia just snorted.

Two and a half days later, they stumbled out of the Lifeboat again, dirty, exhausted, and at odds with each other.

"Well?" Connor asked.

Lucy didn't see Denise anywhere.

"We didn't kill her." Wyatt stared down at his hands. His voice was rough from all the smoke. "Didn't even see her."

"Did you find the cabin?" Connor asked.

Lucy nodded dully. "She wasn't there." They'd waited, and waited, but hadn't seen her. They'd checked the inside of the cabin, looking for clues as to when she'd intended to return, and found nothing. An encroaching wildfire had forced them to race for the Lifeboat.

"Emma jumped—"

"We know." Jiya barely managed to keep the snap out of her voice. When they'd returned to the Lifeboat, they'd discovered that Emma had stopped off in rural Iowa, 1930, on her way back to present-day New York City.

"I don't know what she was doing there," Lucy said. "I'll check some books."

"I'll check Wikipedia." Jiya headed for her console, hard drive in head.

Connor got in her way. "No, you should probably go upstairs and go to bed."

"You condescending ass," Jiya snapped.

Everyone stopped.

"Jiya, you are  _exhausted_ , I am not, and I remember how to run a simple diff, thank you very much. You don't have anything to prove here."

"Emma could jump again any time," Lucy pointed out.

Jiya's shoulders dropped, and the fight seemed to go out of her. "Fine," she muttered, and stumbled towards the ladder.

"Lucy?"

She looked up at Wyatt.

"Want the barn shower first?"

They had a rule of 'pilot showers first,' unless the pilot chose to waive that rule because she or he had to do something with the Lifeboat. But they also had a second shower... sort of.

"And get eaten alive by mosquitoes? No thanks." It was past ten in the evening; they'd be fierce out there. "Connor, when did Denise leave?"

"Shortly after you did. She filled the refrigerator and freezer first, though."

Lucy nodded dully. Garcia, then Wyatt, headed for the ladder. She started to follow—

"Lucy, could I have a word?"

She turned back to Connor.

"I had a chance to look over your physics aptitude scores."

She stared at him flatly.

"It confirmed what I suspected, which is that, despite your lack of background, you have just as much potential in this area as any other. You'd make a decent pilot."

She continued to stare. "You'll understand if I don't jump for joy."

"Yes," he said gently. "I will. But... I know you're going to think about it anyway."

She looked at him for another moment. Then she silently went upstairs. The bathroom was open. She gathered her things and sluiced off two and a half days of grime and ash.

Once she was clean, she grabbed ten books from the stacks that had quickly migrated into their bedroom, and started cracking them open. Garcia came in, hair wet from his own shower, wearing the t-shirt and shorts he slept in. "Want help?"

She silently handed him the bottom five books.

They flipped pages for a good hour. "I'm not seeing anything," she said finally. It felt like admitting defeat.

He looked at her, and shook his head once.

She moved the books to the floor and stared at the ceiling. She felt him watching her for a moment or two.

Finally, he quietly asked, "Can I, uh, help?"

She shook her head.

He nodded, once, accepting that. "Can you sleep?"

She nodded.

He collected his water glass from the dresser and hers from the desk, and closed the door behind him. She scrambled into her pajamas, and turned the overhead light off, leaving just the dresser lamp on. He knocked before he opened the door, as he always did if there was any question of her state of dress.

"Yeah."

He closed the door behind him and handed her her glass, now full of ice water and already slick with condensation. She drank eagerly. Thanks to the filter Connor had created from little more than spare parts, the water now tasted much better. The coldness against her tongue roused her from her stupor.

Maybe this wasn't entirely existential despair. Maybe it was equal parts despair, exhaustion, and perpetual dehydration.

Prospects for the morning looked slightly brighter.

She put her glass on the desk and crawled into her cot, thankful all over again for a safe place to sleep, behind a closed door and with a wall at her back. "'Night," she murmured, already tumbling towards sleep.

"Good night, Lucy."

#

The alarm went off seven hours later.

"Northern Nebraska again," Jiya reported, as the others gathered wearily around her. "I'm trying to get a fix on the nearest town. It was a double jump: first they made a quick stop in 1931, and then... October 15 th , 1880."

"What the hell is it with the 1930s all of a sudden?" Wyatt demanded.

No one had an answer.

"Did she go to the same place as before?" he added. "Iowa?"

"Both jumps were in Nebraska."

Wyatt looked at Lucy. "What happened on October 15 th , 1880, Professor?"

Lucy was shaking her head, without the obvious signs of a Lucy  _aha!_ moment. "... I don't know."

The earth quietly shook on its axis.

"I mean, that winter was known as the Snow Winter on the Great Plains, it was the first in a series of really terrible winters that decade, and the blizzards started the next day, but northern Nebraska specifically?" She frowned. "Not much there besides settlers. Unlike Emma's last trip, the railroad hadn't made it that far west yet."

"More Nebraska blizzards in the 19 th century? What can Emma possibly want there?"

No one had any good answers.

"What changed on her last trip?" Flynn asked. "Mason? You run your program?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

"The copy of Wikipedia you carried in the Lifeboat and the copy I kept here are line-by-line identical," Connor said.

Wyatt turned, and leaned against the cave wall looking frustrated.

"Maybe it's a wild goose chase," Flynn suggested. "Maybe she wants us to drain the Lifeboat battery, so she can screw with the past without restraint."

"Right," Wyatt muttered. "Because she doesn't have to worry about draining the Mothership battery. Thanks for that, Flynn."

Flynn looked at Wyatt.

"Emma knows the Lifeboat takes four hours to recharge. If that's what she's after, why wait long enough to let us fuel it up again?" Connor asked.

"Okay," Wyatt said. "Lucy, what about the tribes in the area?"

Lucy considered. "The fighting in the Black Hills had ended a few years earlier. The Lakota Sioux had just lost a huge swath of their remaining land to the government. The fighting didn't really start up again until 1890."

"So, maybe Emma's trying to provoke it earlier," Wyatt suggested.

"Yeah but  _why?_ "

"Make it worse?" Jiya suggested. This whole setup disturbed her. Usually Rittenhouse's motivations were clear. But between the last trip, and this... Was this impenetrability a sign of Emma doing the planning now?

She didn't like it at all.

"You said Anthony said Rittenhouse's goal was to shut down the outliers and the rebels," Wyatt began.

"Anthony was working entirely off of what Emma said at that point. Take it with a small bag of salt," Flynn said.

"Huh, that makes two of you, then."

Lucy intervened before it could escalate to a spat. "Rittenhouse would probably love it if the government defeated the various Plains tribes even earlier, but why here and now? I mean, the Lakota Sioux are pretty much defeated for good— militarily, at least— a few years later, so what does moving it up gain? Ten years from now is Wounded Knee. Already, three hundred out of three hundred and fifty die. Unarmed. Women. Children."

"... wipe them out entirely?" Jiya hated the words in her mouth. "That band?"

"I guess the Wounded Knee massacre leads to the occupation of Wounded Knee," Lucy said after a minute. "But that's in 1973. If Emma wants to change something there, she's young enough to go back and do it herself."

"Okay," Wyatt said. "Um. Snow Winter. You said it was bad. Anyone narrowly escape death who went on to be important?"

Lucy thought for a minute, and frowned. "Laura Ingalls. But she's not in northern Nebraska."

"Who's Laura Ingalls?"

"Laura Ingalls Wilder, she wrote the Little House books? You know,  _Little House in the Big Woods_ ,  _Little House on the Prairie_ ...?"

Wyatt was giving her a blank look.

"— look, she's important," Lucy finished. "But she's not  _there_ ." She leaned over the table, and frowned at the map.

It was all white. "That's the historical map," Jiya told her. "Let me switch to the modern— ... one."

The modern map was also mostly blank.

"Uh, anyway," Jiya said. "While we're waiting for Nebraska to invent... towns. They're definitely somewhere in here—" Jiya showed a circle on the map. "— with the highest probability in here."

"See, DeSmet, South Dakota, is— zoom out?"

Jiya did.

"It's way up here. Way too far to travel, if they're after Laura. Especially considering there's not enough people around that they can count on buying or even stealing horses."

"Anyone  _else_ important?" Wyatt asked.

"I mean, important is a value judgement, but no one else who really becomes a household name. Even a Preston household name. There's probably  _someone_ important who traces their roots to this area, but... there's also easier ways to kill them." Lucy continued to frown at the map. "Go back to the probability circle and zoom out a bit?"

Jiya pulled both locations up.

Lucy straightened up. "Close to the border. The Lost Company," she murmured. "I thought they were just a myth."

"What's the Lost Company?" Wyatt prompted, rather impatient, after a minute.

"An army company that supposedly disappeared in that area, that winter. The official explanation used to be the Lakota Sioux, except... if the army really believed they'd wiped out a whole company of soldiers, there would've been massive reprisals. For a while the theory was that they all basically went rogue and went to the Black Hills to look for gold, because after fighting in the area they knew where the good claims were."

"How do you  _lose_ an entire army company?" Wyatt asked. "Even in 1880? I mean, either these guys existed or they didn't."

"You're right. You don't. Which is why most historians now think it's a myth. A few stories of desertions and deaths from poor provisions and equipment getting exaggerated out of proportion. But this blizzard... that could be the real explanation."

"So, if they exist, what does Emma want with them?" Jiya asked after a minute. "I mean, if they all disappeared, clearly none of them go on to influence history in any  _public_ way."

"Did these rumors play a role in anything important later?" Flynn seemed as lost as any of them.

Lucy shook her head.

"Wyatt, any, uh, secret army history here you wanna relate?" Flynn prompted.

Wyatt shook his head. "I'd never heard of these guys."

"Who may or may not exist," Jiya added.

"So," Wyatt said after a minute. "Emma's gone somewhere in northern Nebraska,  _again_ , we're not sure exactly where, to do something, we're not sure what, with a bunch of soldiers who may or may not have actually existed, for reasons we don't understand."

"Yep," Lucy said after a minute of daunted silence.

"Great." Wyatt straightened up. "Then what are we waiting for?"

"Am I the only one who heard Lucy say  _blizzard_ ?" Flynn asked.

They looked at each others' clothes. They were all in tank tops and shorts. None of them had put shoes on before coming downstairs.

"I saw a box of winter gear around here somewhere," Wyatt said.

They looked at the tall stack of plastic tubs against the far wall.

"I'll, uh, prep the Lifeboat," Jiya volunteered, not feeling particularly sorry to miss out on moving all those boxes.

The "winter gear" was military surplus from the eighties. But it was  _Soviet_ military surplus, so they would, at least, be warm.

At least.

"This is ridiculous," Lucy muttered, discarding one coat and digging through the tub.

Jiya was inclined to agree. These were all  _men's_ clothes. Anything that fit her boobs and hips was going to be way too long in the sleeves and legs. 

But. "Could be worse," she pointed out. "Could be corsets and bustles."

Lucy looked from Jiya to the jacket in her hand. "Okay, good point."

Eventually, they all found clothes that left them looking like loyal komrades, and sweltering in the Florida heat. They loaded some supplies into the already-cramped Lifeboat and strapped in. The tight quarters smelled of sweat and... more sweat. At this point, Nebraska in autumn might even be a relief.

"So, we jump, we find some horses, and we track Emma down?" Jiya asked, initiating startup.

_And shoot her?_ she added silently.

"I doubt there'll be any horses. We'd have to find a population center for that."

"And you can't suggest one?" Jiya looked over her shoulder to see Lucy shaking her head.

"There's just not a lot of there,  _there_ ."

"Great." Jiya brought the stabilizers online and started the calibration. "Well, at least this company should be easy to find."

"Uh... why?" Wyatt asked.

"You know, Nebraska? Great flat land of corn stretching out to the horizon?"

In the silence that followed, she looked over her shoulder again. Wyatt was giving her a strange look. "You've never been to Nebraska, have you."

The Lifeboat was ready to go then, so Jiya didn't think about that too much. One nauseating, bone-rattling jump later, the Lifeboat slowly spun down.

Wyatt cautiously opened the hatch. "It's not that cold," he said, surprised.

"Yeah, that'll probably... change pretty quickly," Lucy said.

They all looked at each other. "Great," Wyatt sighed. "Okay, we should split up."

"Uh, does  _any_ good ever come of that?" Jiya asked. "Each time you came back and reported to Denise, 'we split up' was when the red warning lights started flashing in my head."

"We don't have much choice," Wyatt said. "We need to find Emma, fast, before that storm hits. Besides. This time Flynn isn't lurking around every corner waiting to ambush us."

"No, just Emma," Jiya muttered.

"I've been to this area before," Wyatt told them. "It's dry—"

"Do we want to know what Delta Force was doing in rural Nebraska?"

"No. So, if this company camped, they likely did it near the Niobrara River. It's a mile or two north. Lucy and I will head west. Jiya, you and Flynn head east." He glanced at Jiya for a second, waiting for an objection. But whatever her other opinions of Flynn, Jiya didn't have any doubts about his competence— or, any more, about his loyalty.

Jiya glanced at Lucy. Everyone except for Wyatt would probably be happier if they switched up the teams. But Lucy didn't make eye contact and didn't say anything. Okay, then.

Wyatt hadn't missed that little exchange. At least he didn't comment. They divided food, water, and other supplies between them, filling their anachronistic but efficient Soviet-issue packs. Wyatt handed Flynn a flare gun, a compass, and a walkie talkie.

"Oh, hey." Jiya tugged open a cabinet by her foot. "Take these. Locator beacons for the Lifeboat. I made them a while ago when I couldn't sleep." Considering the team was going to split up and wander the trackless prairie, which still sounded like a terrible plan, they needed all the help they could get. "Range is fifty miles. Volume indicates distance, pitch indicates direction. Spin in a circle and head in the direction of the highest tone. Solid tone is the Lifeboat. Blips indicate the other beacons. So... don't turn them on now or we'll all be deafened."

"How long do they last?" Flynn asked.

"Oh. Uh, I don't know."

"But you've tested them," Wyatt said. "Right?"

"I wandered around near the house for a while..."

"Right," Wyatt said. "Well, it's always good to have backup."

Jiya was the last one out. Wyatt helped her down as Flynn and Lucy studied the area. The sky was leaden and grey: not dark enough to see campfires, not light enough to be... cheerful. There was surprisingly little snow, just lingering in patches here and there at the bottoms of the hills. Because there were hills.

She poked the dirt with her boot. "Is this a  _sand dune_ ?"

"Welcome to Nebraska," Wyatt told her. "Lucy, when do the storms start?"

"Sometime before sunrise. People were sleeping, and accounts come from different places."

"Okay. If no one finds anything, we meet back here at three am. If you do find anything, keep your distance and radio in. We'll do a radio check once we're each past the first hill. Got it?"

Lucy and Jiya nodded. Flynn didn't visibly or audibly object. Each pair started turned around and started walking.

And walking.

And walking.

Well, Jiya and Flynn kept walking; presumably Lucy and Wyatt did too, but they were far out of sight. There was nothing  _in_ sight but brown grass and sand. Off to their left was the river, flanked by trees and shrubs with colorful leaves and the occasional evergreen, but both river and trees were only intermittently in their sight.

They stuck to the hollows between dunes to avoid being silhouetted, which helped with the wind. Flynn also made a great windbreak. At intervals he stopped, and had them climb carefully up a dune, then wriggle towards the top, to check over the edge.

Jiya had lost count of the number of times they'd done this when she made a really unfortunate discovery.

" _Fuck_ ," she hissed, yanking her face out of the dirt. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck—"

"Jiya?"

"—  _fuck!_ " She pawed at her face and just succeeded in poking her fingers and wriggling the spines painfully. "I just put my face in a damn  _cactus!_ " Why were there  _cacti_ in  _Nebraska_ in  _October?_ Did they have to follow her everywhere she went? Wasn't it bad enough having them back at the base?

"Stop touching it, you'll make it worse."

"I'm not—"

"Hold  _still_ ." He held her chin with one hand and plucked the spines out with painful efficiency with the other.

"Thanks," she muttered, pained and embarrassed and just—

Why.

"Keep your face out of the dirt," he added.

_Thank you, Captain Obvious._

They kept going, finding no sign of anyone else for miles. Her feet ached, and her shins ached from the heavy boots. She'd worked very hard in Chinatown, but she'd never had to  _walk_ this much. And she hadn't been sleeping enough for... a while. She'd been exhausted when they arrived.

Flynn called a halt, and stared, frowning, over the dune through his binoculars. Jiya took advantage of a scrubby shrub to pee. Ooooh, she did  _not_ need  _that_ flesh exposed to the icy wind, thank you very much.

When she reemerged, he was turning in a slow circle, frowning at his locator beacon. He gave her a dubious look, as if wondering if she'd orchestrated the whole thing to make them all spin in circles and look like idiots, then focused on the beacon again.

"You calibrated these," he said abruptly. "How far are they?"

She held out her hand for it. When he raised his eyebrows, she explained, "I took the battery out of mine to save it, as long as we're together."

"Ah." He handed his over.

She listened carefully, and thought back to her hour of wandering through the Florida scrub, testing. "It's not exact, but... maybe ten miles?"

"Which probably means they haven't found the camp, or if they halted, it was very recently." His frown deepened. "Is there anything back at the Lifeboat that could help us find the camp?"

She looked at him in disbelief. "You're asking this  _now_ ?"

He looked at her as if completely baffled as to why she might be upset.

"I mean, I could pull up a map of the area and..."

He shook his head. "I saw the map you showed. It wasn't very helpful." He frowned at the walkie talkie, but did not use it. "Can you feel your fingers and toes? All of them?"

"Um, yeah."

He continued to frown.

"You've been camping, right?" she asked.

"If by 'camping' you mean 'living outside for months,' then yes."

"I was just thinking it's freezing, and—"

"That does tend to happen on the High Plains in autumn."

"Would it actually kill you to stop being sarcastic for half a second?" she demanded.

"That's not a risk I'm willing to take."

"It's freezing, and in addition to water, they need wood to burn. And there's not abundance of that out here, except by the river. So if they're not in the one spot that has water and  _fuel_ , they must have a good reason."

"There are lakes and marshes scattered around," he said after a minute. "Some of those have trees. But you're not wrong, a company would go through a lot of firewood."

A coyote yelped somewhere in the distance. Night came early, in northern Nebraska in October, and it was already getting dark. They'd been walking for hours.  _We should've jumped earlier_ . 

Lucy had said  _before sunrise_ . Intellectually, Jiya knew that was still a long way away. They had like... ten? hours of daylight right now. But she was a programmer; she worked at all hours, regardless of what was happening outside. To her brain,  _night_ was a very short thing, and she couldn't shake the feeling that Blizzards Were Coming.

It  _was_ just a feeling, though. Not a premonition. She knew the difference by now.

Trudging across the prairie in the dark was even worse than trudging across the prairie in daylight. She kept stumbling on hidden holes in the ground. "If I were a soon-to-be-missing army company," she mused at their next halt, "where would I hide."

He gave her a sidelong look. "In their shoes, shelter and safety would be the only things that would keep me away from the river. For some reason, the river's not safe for them."

"Maybe because it's the obvious place?"

"From who? The Sioux have been driven out of this area by now and occasional raids wouldn't trouble a company."

She didn't have an answer.

"Maybe we haven't gone far enough. Come on."

She started taking a turn with the binoculars at each halt; her eyes were fifteen years younger, and maybe if the company was far off or the light was low, she'd have a better chance of seeing their fires than Flynn would.

Flynn put the binoculars away, climbed carefully away from the top of the dune, straightened up, took his hat off, and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked frustrated. "Extremities?" he asked after a minute.

"Uh, attached?"

He looked down at her. "Frostbite is a joke to you?"

"Jeez, Flynn. They're fine. I can feel everything."

"Fine."

"Good." They kept going. "Lucy, uh, would be able to tell us the exact proportion of the Grande Armée that died of exposure, not to mention the Wehrmacht in the USSR—"

"What a shame she's not here," Jiya muttered. She liked Lucy very much. But statistics about huge numbers of people freezing to death? Not what she needed to hear right now.

"— and the Continental Army in Valley Forge—"

"Flynn, shut up."

A long, high howl in the distance made her blood rush in her veins. Her heart raced. They were so  _exposed_ out here, in the middle of the Nebraska prairie, with no one for tens of miles. She felt it viscerally, and it terrified and thrilled her.

An answering howl came, closer. She felt the fear in her bones. She nearly asked,  _do you have another gun?_ and then remembered who she was talking to. "How many extra guns do you have?" she whispered.

He dug in his pack and handed her a pistol and an extra magazine. Automatically, she checked the safety. He looked around, cautious and watchful, but didn't seem concerned— yet. "Let's go."

They kept walking. She tried not to think about wolves, creeping stealthily up behind them—

_Oh God._ She shivered, not from the cold. She was trying  _not_ to think about it.

— or _blizzards_ howling across the Plains with unstoppable energy— or Emma, with some kind of high-powered rifle with infrared sights—

Flynn stopped so abruptly she almost ran into him. "This Mothership locator, how accurate is it actually?"

"I mean..." She considered this. This was only her third— deliberate— trip, but she'd heard the reports from most of the other trips. "Usually with a general  _when_ and  _where_ , Lucy can figure out the  _what_ ." Which told them more specifically  _where_ . "So we've never really had a great test of its accuracy or its precision. It's never led us astray, if that's what you're asking."

"And the accuracy of that probability cone?"

"Again, I don't know."

"Oh," he said, falsely cheerful. "Great."

They kept going. Next time they stopped, he scanned the area with binoculars again, and paused, facing north. He watched for so long that Jiya wondered what was happening, because he didn't look eager or tense, as if he'd found the camp.

Finally he handed her the binoculars. "Have a look."

She looked up at him doubtfully, but did so. She scanned the dunes. Even with the moon nearly full, she could barely—

She stopped.

Even at this magnification, she could only see some light-colored blobs clustered around something dark on the ground. The slight shaking of her hands didn't help. But, if that was what she thought it was, she was just fine not having a closer look.

She handed the binoculars back. "So, they've feeding now which means they're not hungry and they're not going to bother us?"

"Probably."

Great. You could always count on Flynn for reassurance.

He watched them a moment longer. "Another thirty, forty years and they'll be gone," he murmured, more to himself than to her. She heard real regret in his voice. "They're scarce already. It must be the low population density in the hills protecting them."

_Of course_ what Flynn expressed actual feelings (besides anger) over was the pending demise of a— another— top predator.

But, when he put it that way... it  _was_ kind of cool.

They— surprise, surprise— kept going. Jiya started to feel dizzy from fatigue. She drank some water and scarfed down a protein bar as they walked, carefully tucking the wrapper away in an inside compartment of her bag. That helped a little.

Flynn stopped suddenly, crouched, and pulled her down, looking towards the river. She looked where he was looking, and saw nothing unusual.

"What?" she whispered.

He continued staring silently, with and without his binoculars. "There's nobody down there," he said finally.

"Uh, I know."

"Let's go."

They scrambled down the slope, Flynn moving a lot more quietly than she could. Bewildered, she followed him through a fringe of trees towards the river. He stopped, and put an arm out to stop her. "They  _were_ here."

She looked at him. "How can you tell?"

He looked at her, unimpressed, as if it should be blindingly obvious to her. She glared back mutinously, more than ready to retort. Okay, so, fine. This probably wasn't any more fun for him than it was for her, an experienced soldier stuck with a total novice. So, fine, he wasn't being completely terrible.  _Still_ .

"Over there." He pointed. "They've worn tracks going to and from the river."

"Are you sure those aren't from animals?"

"Wearing boots?"

"Oh."

"And over there, that hole in the ground surrounded by a perfect circle of trampled dirt? Someone tethered horses there for a long time."

"Oh."

"And then there's the fire pit ten feet in front of us."

"Okay, okay."

"I want to look for evidence. Sit out of the way somewhere."

She might have objected to that instruction, except she wouldn't be any help and she was exhausted. So she found a comfortable tree to lean against, sat on her bag, and ate another protein bar.

Flynn took his time poking around in various patches of dirt that all looked identical to her. From the area he inspected, the camp had been a fairly large one. That made sense if a whole company had been here.

She didn't realize she'd dozed off until Flynn's footstep made her jolt awake. He handed her his locator beacon. "How far are they?"

Lucy and Wyatt were... westish, maybe west-northwest. And they were far. "Fifteen, twenty miles?" she guessed, handing the thing back.

Flynn tried the walkie-talkie. Even from here, she could hear that he only got static in return. His expression hardened a little.

"Maybe they're just out of range," she pointed out.

"Maybe, but that's still inconvenient." He put the walkie-talkie away. "The group here went west along the river. There are no tracks leading east."

Jiya frowned. "Were they here for a while?"

"Looks like it."

"And yet when they moved, they kept going far enough that Wyatt and Lucy haven't found them yet, or..."

They looked at each other.

He shouldered his pack. "Come on."

They followed the tracks, or rather, Flynn followed the tracks and Jiya followed Flynn. But as they went, she started to see it, too, wherever there was enough light to let her make out details: stretches of dimpled, hardened mud, dirt that had been churned up by many feet and hooves, and then partially smoothed back down by water and wind.

Jiya was exhausted, but she knew she wasn't about to drop. She'd pushed herself hard often, first in college, then working in a pair of startups, then at Mason Industries... then in Chinatown.

But the trek was interminable. Flynn stopped at intervals to look closer at some patch of dirt, to check the walkie talkies, or to ask her to get a fix on Wyatt and Lucy. The tone changed enough over time that she knew the other two were still moving, which was marginally reassuring.

They stopped around ten to attend to various bodily needs. Jiya sat on a log and ate dispiritedly, but she had to admit, the sky was beautiful. She'd always been a city girl, and even her three years in Chinatown had been in San Francisco. The sky here was largely obscured by clouds, but the visible patches had more stars than she'd ever seen before. She was secretly of the opinion that most of the poetry and prose that waxed rhapsodic over the night sky was, well, full of it. But now she started to understand.

"Do you have any other ideas?" she asked suddenly.

Flynn looked at her. "What?"

"You're our second-most expert historian after Lucy. Do you think it could be anything else besides the soldiers?"

He considered for a moment. "Hard to know what."

"What if—" She stopped.

He raised his eyebrows.

"You lured the team back to 1754 to strand them there." She gave him a pointed look before she continued. "What if Emma did the same?"

"She'd have to be sure of finding the Lifeboat before the blizzard set in. There's no way she jumped without knowing about that. Twenty-five miles of prairie isn't an easy thing to search. As we're discovering." He shook his head. "The only way we managed it is because we didn't have a time constraint."

"Well, you did manage it." She was surprised by the bitterness in her tone.

He looked at her, not angry or even particularly defensive. "I was gonna go back for them after everything was done."

She couldn't help laughing, because it was so ridiculous. "Like hell you were."

"I was gonna go back for  _Lucy_ , and Lucy wasn't gonna leave the other two."

Okay, Jiya could... buy that. "They could have been dead by the time you got back."

He looked at her like she were an idiot. "It's a  _time machine_ , Jiya, I would've jumped back to five minutes after we left."

Fine. Whatever. "What if Emma  _is_ here to kill the ancestors of someone important and she's chosen here and now so we can't figure out who?"

"Right before a blizzard? She's not stupid."

"Or maybe one of these soldiers is important in some secret way."

"We're not gonna know if we don't find them. Come on."

They kept going. A stiff breeze swayed the bare branches higher up, but they were mostly sheltered by the hills. She monitored the beacon; Flynn tried the walkie-talkie at intervals. The farther west they got with only static, the grimmer he looked.  _Grim_ wasn't quite the right adjective. It lacked... force.

_Oh shit, oh shit, oh—_ No. It was okay. Jiya had just made the beacons since they'd come to Florida. There was no possible way for Emma to know about them. So she wouldn't have been able to factor them into any plan to destroy the Lifeboat. 

If she did— capture— Wyatt and Lucy, she was smart enough to figure out what the beacons were and how they worked. But would she bother to search them and their stuff?

_No. She'll just shoot them._

_But she might search their stuff afterwards._

"This could be an elaborate plan to let her make more jumps undetected while we're traipsing around the prairie," Jiya pointed out a while later.

Flynn didn't say anything.

"Although, we're already out of the current time stream, so anything she changes, we'll remember. At least if it's after 1880. And because she's already been there, we can follow her later and stop her... I think."

"If the other three'd had you running strategy for them," Flynn said after a minute, "they might have done a slightly less terrible job of stopping me."

She was pretty sure that was a compliment— but still. "They  _did_ stop you," she pointed out. "I seem to recall from the debriefs you getting your ass handed to you on a regular basis."

Flynn stopped and gave her a Look. This was only about a four on the zero to murder Flynn scale, but the scale, you know,  _ended in murder_ .

She knew she was perfectly safe as the only remaining Lifeboat pilot. Still. She wasn't gonna press her—

She looked up.

"Flynn," she gasped.

He spun in a complete circle, sweeping the area with gun drawn, only lowering it when he faced her. "Wh—"

She pointed up. He turned and looked. The river valley hid part of the sky from them. But now they could see the forbidding mass of black clouds in the northwest, silently and ominously blotting out the stars as they rolled slowly across the sky.

Flynn grabbed her arm. " _Run_ ."

They ran. Jiya had thought she was in good shape. But she'd never before had to run for her life for  _miles_ . Her lungs burned. Her side throbbed. Her shins felt like they would break. An icy wind running ahead of the clouds blew in their faces, and her skin ached with the cold.

She stumbled, recovered her balance, and kept going. Each time they descended a hill, her ass burned with exertion, and each time they climbed, it was her quads. Another hill. Another. Five. She lost track.

She nearly dropped the beacon as she fumbled it out of her pocket. She had to stop running to check their direction, and she gasped gratefully for air as she turned. "A little to the east!" she shouted. And they ran again.

She tripped and went sprawling. Flynn hauled her bodily up by her jacket and set her upright again, pulling her forward. Her forehead stung, from blood or from the wind or from the bits of sand the wind was beginning to blow in their faces.

The dark clouds came closer and closer, hiding the sky overhead. She knew they looked closer than they were— she  _thought_ they looked closer than they were—

With a bloodcurdling shriek, a new wind attacked them from the northwest. It almost blew Jiya off her feet. Flynn yanked her forward. Her legs and her lungs were in agony, but if she stopped— oh God, she couldn't stop. She rubbed the backs of her gloves against her face, trying to at least ease the burning there.

"Check the beacon!" he yelled after minutes of this. "We're being blown off-course!" He was right there, but she could barely hear him.

She stopped with a grateful sob and fished out the beacon. She could barely hear  _it_ . Was the battery dying? No. There. It was enough. "Bear east!" she shouted.

They did, now with Flynn's flashlight to cut through the darkness. The light made it easier to find their way, but also revealed how the grass was nearly flattened. The light would give away their position instantly to anyone watching, but— they couldn't worry about Emma right now.

The snow struck without warning. The wind attacked savagely, tearing at her clothes, her face, stealing her breath. She cried out as her world went white. The horizon, the horizon  _was gone_ — the same eerie glow from everywhere— no direction— suddenly, _lost_ —

She collided with something solid. Flynn grabbed her shoulders, the flashlight digging into her skin, before she could recoil far. He was close enough that he blocked the wind in that direction, and she almost cried with relief.

" _We're gonna get out of this!"_ he yelled, though he was inches from her.  _"But you gotta stay calm!"_ He kept one hand on her shoulder, grabbed for her other hand, and put it on his belt. "Whatever you do, don't let go!"

_"We CAN'T SEE!"_

_"We don't need to see! We have the beacons! Hang on, I'm gonna tie us together! Don't let_ go! _"_

Jiya clung to his belt as he swung his pack off his shoulder and felt around in it. She stared at him to fight the sickening sense of disorientation, then just closed her eyes.

This was hell, and they were going to die.

_Like_ hell _we are_ . She had a life to live. She had a bunch of vile scumbags to defeat. She had Rufus to save.

She clung to those thoughts just as she clung to Flynn, because she was tough and she was brave— but she was also human, and she was  _terrified._

Something flashed when she opened her eyes: Flynn, flashlight now in his mouth, sheathed his knife, then put a coil of cord back in his bag. He yanked her oversized jacket up, tied one end of a length of cord around her belt, then reached behind him and, presumably, tied the other end to his own belt. He took another length, tied one end tight around her left sleeve, and then, despite the thick gloves, tied the other end around his own left wrist. "Check the beacon!"

To turn in a circle without tangling, she had to raise her left wrist above her head, like a bizarre dance. But he'd left plenty of slack in the lines. She listened intently, then pointed. He nodded, apparently concurring, and turned in that direction. "Hang on to my pack!"

They stumbled forward into the hellish whiteness. They had to go slow, blinded and connected as they were, guided only by the beacon. She had thought that nothing could be worse than the mad sprint they'd just finished, but now that they were no longer running, the cold nipped mercilessly at her fingers and toes. At all of her.

In the scream of the storm, she couldn't possibly gauge the loudness of the beacon. She had no idea how far they'd come or how far they still had to travel to get to the Lifeboat. She knew Flynn was taking the brunt of it. As big as he was, even he stumbled in the particularly brutal gusts. She probably would have been blown off her feet.

The beacon's signal got lower and lower, and finally died. She felt exquisitely painful panic until she remembered the other in her pack. She yanked on Flynn's pack until he stopped, and dug around for the second beacon. Her gloved hands were clumsy, but when she started to yank her right glove off in desperation, the cold brought tears to her eyes.

She found the damn thing, and promptly dropped it in the snow.

She stifled her scream of horror/anguish, and crouched to—

But she forgot she was tied to Flynn.

The rope strained around her belt a half-second before a sharp blow to her back and a smothering weight sent her sprawling face-first in the snow. Words she didn't understand but could interpret just fine— then the weight vanished and Flynn yanked her to her knees.

"The beacon!" she shouted, before he could pull her up or get up himself. She felt frantically in the snow for it. Any imprint it might have left had been destroyed by their combined impact.

His already-grim expression turned grimmer. He sat back, blocking the worst of the wind, but caught her eye. She'd been the one to see it fall, and he wasn't, apparently, going to confuse her search area any more than they already had, but she knew he would help as soon as she asked.

The other beacon was dead or she could have used it to find this one— no, this one was still off, wasn't it— she fought down her panic. Looked at the whole-body imprint she'd left in the snow to figure out where she'd been when she fell. Figured out where she'd been when she'd been standing. Dug frantically through the snow, leaving holes that looked like the tracks of a deranged snow gopher. Fought back more panic. She couldn't feel anything through these damned gloves. She tugged at the fingers of—

Flynn grabbed her wrist. "Keep those on unless you wanna lose a hand!" he shouted.

But she couldn't  _feel_ anything. If she couldn't feel— maybe she could see. "Flashlight!"

Flynn held the flashlight for her. The cold seemed to burn through her entire body. It was the worst thing she'd ever—

There.  _There._ Metal gleamed. She stilled her shaking hand, and plucked the beacon carefully out of the snow. She clutched it tightly in her glove, breathed on it, hit the button, and listened to the tone to find the way.

They stumbled on, and on, and  _on_ —

A huge dark shape loomed out of the whiteness.

Jiya's eyes filled with tears. Her heart raced from relief. Flynn boosted her up so she could get the hatch open, then cut the cords connecting them. Just as suddenly as it had risen, her heart sunk when she saw the inside empty and unoccupied.

Flynn scrambled in after her and closed the door. It was cold as  _hell_ in here, barely warmer than outside, but the metal shell cut the wind. She turned on the emergency lights.

The Lifeboat had never been designed as a  _real_ lifeboat. What insulation it had was to protect the delicate equipment, not its passengers. But they were out of the wind, and they had food and water. Better: Jiya opened the emergency kit with badly shaking hands, took out the Mylar blankets, and handed one to Flynn. She unfolded her own carefully, so her trembling didn't tear it apart. 

Her whole body ached from shivering. Slowly, slowly, the cold eased to where it was just barely tolerable. She didn't think her muscles wouldn't unclench until they were back in Florida, but her panic started to fade.

Her panic about freezing to death herself. Lucy and Wyatt... were still out there.

She fished the beacon out of her coat and listened for the blip of its mates, but she couldn't judge the distance well. They were coming from the west, and they were a lot closer than the last time Jiya had checked their position.

She looked over at Flynn, who was also still shivering. He looked back at her through the near-darkness. Again, he looked grimmer than before.

She stripped off one glove and touched the controls to start the Lifeboat, but drew her fingers back at the burning cold metal.

"What are you doing?" Flynn asked. "We can't leave."

"I'm... not leaving." Without Lucy and Wyatt? Was he crazy? "The climate controls are rudimentary, but, they do work. The power they draw is nothing compared to the power to bend time and space."

"How cold can the Lifeboat operate?"

"As cold as anywhere on Earth. How do you not know this? You stole Mason Industries internal documents. You know creepy stuff about our personal lives."

He frowned.

"What, you think Connor Mason makes bad stuff? Trust me, his questionable decisions are limited to... everything  _besides_ his engineering. This thing was made as a rescue vehicle." She patted the controls fondly. "She can go anywhere." She paused. "Why, how cold do you think it is?"

"If this is the storm from the Wilder book, it's about zero. Fahrenheit."

He said it with a particular bite that she at first attributed to Lucy and Wyatt's still being out in the storm. But that was a... strange way for him to put it. He hadn't shown any recognition when Lucy brought Wilder up before—

Except, he'd had a young daughter, hadn't he.

Jiya looked at him. When he'd first joined them, she'd seen him as very two-dimensional. Their former implacable deadly enemy, now their lethally competent maybe-ally. Slowly, she'd begun to see him as a little more rounded: she'd learned that he had a truly regrettable sense of humor, that he could be incredibly patient, even that she could trust him... depending on what she was trusting him  _with_ . Her life, yes. Other things? Negotiable.

Now, it was increasingly difficult not to see other sides to him. He'd had an entirely different life before he entered theirs. He'd had a daughter whom he'd loved dearly, to whom he, apparently, had read Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. He'd... probably been a lot less angry and homicidal then.

Love fucked you up, didn't it.

Jiya looked away, uncomfortable. She didn't want to think about Flynn's choices, or about what he'd gone through, voluntary and otherwise, to become who he was today. She didn't want to think about how a normal-ish person could end up in his shoes.

She turned the heat on, snatching her fingers back from each touch of the cold metal. But she was too clumsy with her big gloves on,  _way_ too clumsy to be operating something that manipulated time and space.

The heat was designed to keep people from dying, not to keep them comfortable. But it would help.

She checked the beacon again. "They're closer," she told him. "They're  _moving_ ."

He made eye contact, but didn't say anything.

Beacons. The beacons tracked the Lifeboat. Maybe she could—

Huh. Could she?

She turned on the Lifeboat's main systems.

"What are you doing?" he demanded again.

"Relax, Flynn. We're not leaving without Lucy and Wyatt. I'm trying to see if I can boost the signal that the beacons lock onto. Make it easier for them. Maybe even send some kind of message— Wyatt should know Morse code, right?" But what message to send? Any directional information, the beacon could convey more succinctly.

"Should we go after them?" she added. She was surprised he hadn't suggested it already.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. "No." It clearly cost him a lot to say it. "You're the only pilot left. You have to stay here. And you can't look after yourself."

"Gee, thanks, Flynn. What exactly do you think I was doing for three years, this decade?"

"In a blizzard?" he demanded. "Against a Rittenhouse squad? Can you look after yourself then? That's why Wyatt and I are  _here_ : to fight the battles you and Lucy can't."

"And Rufus," Jiya muttered.

"And... Rufus." He paused. "Unless we have enough rope in this thing to reach them, going after them wouldn't do any good, anyway. We'd likely miss them in passing and possibly lose our own way." Again, that honesty obviously pained him.

She  _knew_ he wasn't a coward— did he even  _have_ a sense of self-preservation? He wasn't staying in here because he was afraid, that was for sure. He was probably right about the uselessness of going out there, but still, if he'd been alone, Jiya doubted he'd be sitting safe inside.

He was staying here because she was here, and she was his responsibility. Jiya was a little surprised. Because, Lucy, and because Flynn wasn't always known for his, um, rational choice-making.

She didn't like these moments that gave her insight into him— sometimes she even resented them. Which definitely wasn't fair. Ever since Chinatown, he'd been... surprisingly not terrible. Showing her how to shoot. Offering her what clumsy comfort he could over Rufus. Distracting her. Showing her that spot on the roof. But knowing she was being unfair just fueled her resentment, because,  _because_ .

"Was it strange for you?" she asked, digging into the Lifeboat's code. "Protecting someone you tried to have killed?"

She felt him watching her. "No."

Something about that single flat syllable kindled her irritation. "Really? Because it was  _really_ strange for him."

No reply.

"Did you even, you know... apologize to him? Like, ever?" This, too, was another excuse to fuel her anger, because she was certain of the answer.

"That's between me and him," Flynn said. "You're not his proxy."

Jiya snorted. "So, that's a no."

He refused to be baited.

"No wonder Lucy was so freaked out by that whole journal thing," Jiya said. "The prospect of turning into someone who did shit like that would horrify me, too."

"What is this about, Jiya?"

His calm was infuriating her. "This is about you setting Rufus up to die and then  _waltzing_ into the team like it was no. Damn. Big. Deal." She punctuated each of those last words with particularly sharp strikes against the keyboard, then glanced backwards.

He looked back at her, one eyebrow raised.

"Which it probably wasn't, to you," she bit out. "Forcing him to work with the man who wanted to kill him? Ignoring all the shit you put him through as a black man in past America? Pretending—"

"What the  _hell_ else was I supposed to do?" he snapped. The sudden change in his face was— startling.  _Frightening_ . "Rufus and Wyatt and Lucy were determined to protect Rittenhouse. Everything I tried to do, they tried to stop me. I tried stranding them in the past, out of the way. I tried talking to them. They  _knew_ why Rittenhouse was bad, they were  _still_ protecting them! Was I supposed to just let them kill me and let Rittenhouse win? Let them make the world over in their own image, stamp out dissent, kill anyone who got in their way?  _What else was I supposed to do?"_

She stared up at him. He stared down at her. He seemed to realize he was on his feet in a very small space. Abruptly, he sat down in the seat farthest from her.

For a few moments, the only sounds were the howling of the wind outside.

"I never  _wanted_ to kill Rufus," Flynn continued, in a deliberately lower voice. "I wanted to  _stop_ him. But in all your insisting on Rufus's innocence, why don't you go ahead and remember all the times he gave Wyatt a ride to the past so Wyatt could kill me?"

"That was—"

"Really, Jiya?  _How_ was that different?"

It bothered Jiya, deeply, not to have a convincing answer.  _Because you started it. Because you were killing people and changing history and they were just trying to stop you. Because—_ None of those would cut it. Rittenhouse had manipulated  _them_ , pointed them at Flynn like a weapon and pulled the trigger.

She continued her work, trying to isolate the components of the signal the beacons fixed on. Making them had been fairly quick and dirty; she'd just pointed them at the Lifeboat's whole emissions profile. This was a lot harder. She needed to be concentrating, but she couldn't.

"He saved your life, you know," she said abruptly.

"Uh, yeah, I was there."

"Uh, no, you weren't."

Pause. "What are you talking about?" Flynn sounded tired and a little irritated.

She turned around and looked at him in the dim light. She was enjoying this too much. "1962? Houston? Rittenhouse sent a trained operative back to kill your seventeen-year-old mother?"

... okay, she was no longer enjoying this now that Flynn had that look on his face.

"They did," he said quietly, " _what?_ "

Shit. She didn't know if this was fear, pity, or both she was feeling. Just,  _shit_ .

"Yeah, right after Rittenhouse's open takeover of Mason Industries," she said quickly, before Flynn could ask the obvious question of _and how did Rittenhouse's operative_ get _to 1962, Jiya?_ , "Agent Dickface ordered Rufus and Lucy to go along with it and take their assassin back or he'd throw them in prison for fifteen years, so they took him back to 1962, Rufus shot him, they officially went rogue, brought him back, picked up Wyatt, and... went chasing you to Chicago." Pause. "Where you, you know, had Rufus shot."

Flynn was staring at her.

"At least, I'm pretty sure that's the timeline," she said, turning back to the controls so she didn't have to see that expression on his face any more, "Agent Dickface had me locked in the break room for most of it." As if remembering how frankly  _awesome_ she'd been that day inspired her, she managed to isolate the frequency she was searching for. "Adorable how he thought that would stop me."

The silence stretched out.

"Okay, seriously, say something, that's really creepy," she finally muttered.

"No," Flynn said after a minute. "Oddly enough, no one ever thought to mention that little episode to me."

Hell. There was okay, and then there was how Flynn sounded right now.

Jiya glanced over her shoulder, regretting bringing this whole thing up. "They never even got out of the Lifeboat," she said. "They weren't anywhere near... your mother. Don't worry."

"And you  _wonder_ ," Flynn demanded, voice cracking, "why I'll do whatever I have to do to wipe those  _bastards_ off the face of the earth?!"

"No, Flynn, I  _don't_ wonder. No one questions your motivation, okay? But even when your cause is right— it's possible to go to far. You can pay too much." She spun in her chair. "Which you  _know_ , or you wouldn't have told me all that stuff about there being a path that I don't want to walk, and about deciding what I'm willing to do to get Rufus back."

Flynn stared at her, expression still smoldering. "Just because it's true about you doesn't make it universal."

"Oh, for God's sake." She turned back to the controls. "Do whatever you want. Go off and be Batman and brood in your own little world where you're special and unique and the only one who could  _possibly_ fix things."

"Somehow when I think  _brooding_ ," he said after a very long silence, "a man wearing Spandex and pretending to be a flying rodent isn't what comes to mind."

Jiya snorted despite herself. "And yet, somehow, it's a staple of the superhero genre."

She was very,  _very_ glad when the whole subject stayed buried. "There," she said a while later. "I've boosted the signal. If they were having any trouble following us before, they won't be now." For good measure, she checked their position again. "And they are still moving."

Flynn looked at the hatch, his face set in unpleasant lines.

Now that she wasn't actively working, she noticed the cold again. She noticed how her hands and fingers ached, and burned. That probably wasn't good. She pulled her feet up onto the seat and tugged the blanket around herself more tightly.

She closed her eyes...

The alarm jerked her back to full awareness. "Emma's jumped. Present day, New York City."

"So whatever she came to do, she's done it, and we still have no idea what," Flynn muttered.

"Unless the others found something."

A few minutes later, the alarm startled her. "She's... back. In now, 1880. Same radius."

"What the hell are you doing, Emma?" Flynn growled.

Jiya had no idea, and she really just wanted Emma to  _die_ . Preferably at Jiya's own hands, but given the choice between killing Emma later and having her drop dead now, Jiya would take the second one. They'd thought Flynn was bad, before, but Emma was ruthless in a way Flynn had never been.

A few minutes later, Emma jumped back to the present again. And then back to the  _now_ in 1880. "She's taking people to the present," Jiya guessed. "But  _why?_ "

Flynn was silent behind her.

"One of these soldiers who're supposed to die is important. But how could she know that? This isn't like Nicholas Keynes. Lucy said there was so little information on any of them that historians decided they never  _existed_ ." Maybe that was another thing Emma had changed, wiping out the records after she found who she needed. In which case, this plan would have been a long time in the making, because they  _knew_ what she'd been up to with her recent jumps. Unless she was giving orders on the side of her other missions, leaving them to be opened in the future...

Jiya shook her head. "How could she possibly know, unless she's an Emma from the future? Who's gone through this already?"

He clearly didn't like the sound of that, but he had no answers.

Suddenly, Jiya had one. Not about Emma.

_Beacon code beacon code beacon code_ . Did she have a copy on the Lifeboat? No— but it had been a simple program, she remembered most of it. The beacons were giving imprecise locations, because she'd designed them to be small and simple. They were taking  _in_ very precise data, from the Lifeboat— and each  _other_ . If she could get that raw signal, and calculate it right...

"Hang on. We're jumping after all."

"We're—"

"Five seconds in the future, closer to Wyatt and Lucy." A lot closer. Pretty much on top of them closer.

Not exactly on top of them. Jiya had no desire to re-enact  _The Wizard of Oz._

She powered up the main systems, and then had to concentrate on the hardest jump she'd ever made with a fully-functioning Lifeboat. Shaving off such a thin slice of time...

Flynn looked green when they came to a stop. Jiya agreed. She had a pounding headache. But.  _But_ . When she checked the beacon location—

Noise outside. Flynn was out of his seat with his back to the door, gun drawn, faster than she'd thought possible. He motioned to her, and she flanked the hatch on the other side, just in case—

The hatch opened, letting in a rush of painfully cold air— and Lucy falling across the threshold. Flynn holstered his gun and helped her up and in, and Jiya— well. The way Flynn looked at Lucy, just for a second there— Jiya couldn't categorize it, but it  _definitely_ was  _something_ .

Wyatt scrambled in after Lucy and heaved the hatch shut. They were both shaking convulsively. Flynn wrapped his discarded blanket around Lucy as Jiya took two new ones from the kit. "Where's Emma?" Wyatt demanded.

"She's... back in the present. She's jumped back and forth three times." And she'd— what? she'd stopped in 1931 Iowa for like three minutes before her last return to the present. Why?

"Right," Wyatt said. "'Cause  _someone_ let her have a time machine with unlimited jumps."

"She's stayed in the present longer this time," Jiya continued before Flynn could retort. "I think she's there for good."

"Then let's go home." Lucy's voice was shaking, too.

Jiya prepared to jump. She heard some kind of drama behind her— crinkling of blankets, Wyatt making a soft disgusted noise, Lucy's whispered  _thanks_ — but she was far too tired to care. "Did you two find anything?"

"Not a damn thing," Wyatt said. "We never even saw the soldiers. You?"

"No."

The drive trains got up to speed. Jiya shoved aside how strange it felt not to be able to feel her fingers, and maneuvered them through space and time to land in the Batcave. Everyone looked queasy.

She fumbled with her restraints until they came open, made sure all the post-trip diagnostics were in the green, and stumbled out to where the others were already shedding their winter clothes as fast as possible, heedless of what was underneath. It was just too damn  _hot_ .

"What happened?" Connor asked.

"We have no idea," Wyatt grunted. " _Again_ ."

"I'll, ah, compare the Wikipedia copies again."

Jiya started with her boots. She had her tank top underneath her shirt, and her shorts were draped over the work bench; once she got her boots off, she could just go behind the Lifeboat and change.

But the laces, she couldn't— her fingers wouldn't cooperate—

By the time she noticed Flynn noticing her difficulty, he'd squatted in front of her. "Hands?"

She held them out. He took them in his, frowning at them. They were white and numb, and Jiya probably should have been able to feel  _his_ hands more than she could.

He started prodding her skin gently. At least, she assumed it was gentle. "What can you feel?"

"... nothing?"

Wyatt materialized beside the two of them. "You were supposed to be _looking_ _after_ her."

"I had to take my gloves off to pilot the Lifeboat, Wyatt." Jiya spoke less out of a desire to defend Flynn than an unwillingness to become currency in their stupid pissing contest. She looked up. "You know, get us all  _home?_ "

"Put them under running water," Flynn told her. "Cold first, then warmer. Take some ibuprofen. It's gonna hurt."

"I need—" To get out of these  _clothes_ before she got heat sickness in addition to frostbite.

That would be quite the metaphor for her current life, wouldn't it.

Lucy appeared and knelt on Jiya's other side. "You guys go get changed upstairs. Connor, you go too. I'll help Jiya." She deftly unzipped Jiya's jacket, then helped her get the bulky garment off. Ahh, air flow,  _sweet_ air flow.

"Warm your hands as soon as you can," Flynn told her. "Preferably sooner."

He turned to follow Wyatt, but Wyatt had stopped at the bottom of the ladder. Jiya raised her eyebrows at him. He looked at the ladder, then back to her—

Well, shit.

Connor looked between them. "This is a simple engineering problem. We can solve this." He grabbed a bundle of rope from the work bench and chivvied the other two men up the ladder. Whatever else he said was lost in footsteps and echoes of footsteps.

Jiya felt increasingly better, but also more embarrassed, as Lucy helped her with her boots, her shirt, and her pants. "Guess you never thought you'd be playing dress-up at this age, huh?" Jiya attempted an awkward joke, as she had to let Lucy zip up her shorts.

Lucy gave her a little smile that was so free of awkwardness that Jiya felt a little better. "I'm sorry about your hands."

"I'll be fine." She  _would_ , right?

"I'm pretty sure this qualifies you for hazardous duty pay."

"And chasing Emma doesn't?"

"Extra special  _pilot_ hazardous duty pay."

It would be nice if it qualified her for any pay at all. Jiya thought of her apartment. Her  _former_ apartment; no doubt she'd been evicted by now. She'd been able to save a few things but she'd had to pack in a hurry, in the dark, with an armed guard. Her landlord probably would've thrown the rest away.

"Come on," Lucy added. "Let's get you upstairs."

Connor's idea was to fashion a crude climbing harness, and run the rope through the top of the ladder. Wyatt hauled her up with ease; all she had to do was keep herself from bumping painfully against the ladder at the top. Embarrassing, again, but effective.

Rewarming her hands did hurt like hell. Lucy's sympathetic noises didn't help. Jiya almost snapped at her, except Lucy didn't deserve that. Especially not just because Jiya was trying to hide how close she was to breaking down and whimpering.

Flynn checked her hands again and told her she'd probably lose skin, but not any fingernails. "Or, uh, fingers," he added.

Lucy and Jiya gave him remarkably similar Looks. He made himself scarce.

"Do you need anything?" Lucy asked. "Besides..."

"New hands? Um. I think I'm just going to... go lay down." Connor was already checking the Lifeboat, and anyway, Jiya couldn't easily get down there.

She lay down in front of the fan, but she couldn't sleep. She stared at the ceiling until tears welled up, then rolled over and buried them in her pillow. She should be working to get Rufus back and stop Emma, because everything she'd tried before had been  _useless_ , but she was useless  _now_ . Her hands had swelled, and she was really,  _really_ grateful she was going to keep all her appendages, but it was going to hurt to hold a writing implement.

No. Not  _useless_ . Rittenhouse had nearly had both time machines for good. If Jiya hadn't escaped, it would have been game over for them all. 

Just not, you know, good  _enough_ .

She finally drifted off. She woke from a deep sleep to the smell of something delicious. She went to the bathroom, with all the attendant awkwardness and pain of  _that_ set of motions, then headed for the kitchen. Holding silverware was also going to hurt, but... whatever.

Connor, Lucy, and Flynn were already sitting at the table. Wyatt was doing something at the counter. The tone of the conversation didn't sound overtly hostile.

"Jiya, the Lifeboat is fine and should be done charging by the time we're done eating," Connor told her.

"Good." She tried to muster some enthusiasm, because that was better than the alternative.

"I looked at the jump records, by the way. Nice job with that micro-jump."

"Any ideas what they were doing yet?"

Connor shook his head. "Wikipedia's still identical."

Lucy also shook her head, looking baffled, frightened, and angry. "What the  _hell?_ "

Flynn was looking at Jiya's hands. "May I?" he asked awkwardly.

She put her hands in front of him. "As long as you don't start talking about losing fingers again."

Busy checking her hands, Flynn didn't see Wyatt's disgusted look, and while Jiya was in general so  _done_ with this shit between them, she appreciated that look.

Lucy distributed plates as Wyatt brought a large baking sheet to the table. He'd made— pizza. Square pizza, cut into smaller squares.

Jiya gave him a  _I know what you're doing_ look, but he was searching for a fifth chair and didn't see it.

To hell with that. There were worse things in the world than her teammates making it easy for her to eat, and she was  _starving_ .

"So," Wyatt said after they'd all had a chance to eat a bit. "Emma."

No one had any answers.

"Lucy, any idea what she'd be doing in Iowa? Or  _where?_ "

Lucy shook her head. "I'll check in the 50-mile radius—"

"32 mile radius," Jiya said with her mouth full.

"Right. And see what I can find."

"'cause if we can find the place," Wyatt said, "we can go there. And she's already been there, so she can't go back."

"Maybe... she wasn't taking anyone to the present after all," Jiya suggested. "Maybe she was taking something  _back_ . Maybe she wanted the Lost Company to survive the storm, and it hit before she could get them to safety, so she took them... winter stuff."

"I've been checking my books for anything that might not have been in Wikipedia." Lucy shook her head. "I can't find anything."

"More sleeper agents?" Flynn guessed.

They went around in circles a bit more, but, by definition, didn't get anywhere. They didn't seem to have much choice except wait to find out what Emma was up to.

Which wasn't horrifying at all.

#

When Jiya had gone to bed, Lucy collected her clothes and got in the shower. Having the solar shower made her feel slightly better about taking a slightly longer shower inside, and she could really use it. Her muscles, not to mention her feet, were already aching from walking up and down miles and miles and miles of hills. They'd spent some very, very long hours on the prairie.

Very long, and sometimes, very awkward.

_Wyatt checked the walkie-talkie with Flynn. And then there was nothing but brown grass and rolling hills ahead of them._

_And silence._

_He'd asked her how he could make things right. The idea of stringing him along without telling him disgusted her, but she honestly didn't_ know _. And she was afraid of giving him conflicting answers. Before they could ever— try again, she needed him to have really and truly moved on and healed after Jessica. She couldn't do that for him. It couldn't be on her to do that for him. And that just didn't_ happen _in three weeks._

_Not when it had taken him four years the first time._

_But the thought of the unborn Logan baby also haunted her. No, she didn't know if it was real, but that was the problem: neither did he. He couldn't be sure he_ wasn't _abandoning his kid to Rittenhouse, and he didn't seem to care._

_The Lucy she'd displaced after the Hindenburg mission... Mom and Noah had made it clear that Lucy had been very different. Without Dad and Amy around as buffers and moderating influences, how much more had Mom made that Lucy in her own image? What would she have_ become?

_Because Lucy was ashamed of how well Mom had done even in Lucy's own, real timeline. Had every suggestion, every word of praise, been with the intention of molding Lucy into the perfect Rittenhouse heir? Had Mom ever seen Lucy for who she truly was? Had she ever cared to try?_

_Now Lucy would never know how much of her life had been real and how much had been a careful facade. Kind of like how Wyatt would never really know about Jessica. And if Lucy wasn't anywhere near dealing with the shock, months later— well._

_"So, uh," Wyatt said after maybe half a mile. "What do you want to talk about?"_

_"Not my sleeping arrangements."_

_He looked hurt. Lucy felt guilty. But it was easier to get that out of the way at the beginning. It was just way, way easier._

_"Fine," he said evenly._

_"That, um, machine shop," she said, after another five or so strides. "I had no idea you knew how to make all that."_

_He shrugged. "Picked some of it up when I was fixing cars. After I stopped being a bootlegger, I worked at a mechanic's. In high school."_

_"Well, I know Jiya really... appreciates it."_

_Silence. "We're all doing what we can to get him back, right?"_

_His obvious guilt was such a huge stumbling block in any possible reply, and she didn't know how to address it without touching on painful subjects. But he was hurting. "Don't beat yourself up, Wyatt," she said quietly. "It won't help."_

_"Huh, that's weird. Flynn said almost the exact same thing."_

_"Oh? Well, then maybe if you heard it from two different people, completely independently, you should listen."_

_Silence._

_"Three," he muttered. "The shrink said it too."_

_"How's that going?" she asked after a minute. She knew he'd been Skyping with a therapist a few times a week, and she was glad. He'd been through so much. They all had._

_He gave her a sidelong glance, and didn't say anything. Well, that was fair._

_They kept going._

_"Has Jiya showed you that trick she used on you yet? The throw."_

_"Uh, no. She's been busy."_

_Wyatt made a face, acknowledging that. "She could be two of her and she'd still be overworked."_

_Lucy snorted. She couldn't disagree._

_"I can show you sometime," he offered, very carefully. "If you want."_

_"Yeah, maybe." Maybe later. She wasn't sure that was a good idea right now, them grappling in close quarters with lots of panting and physical contact. She didn't want to set herself up to let her attraction to him complicate an already-complicated situation._

_And the attraction was still_ definitely  _there. It would be so easy to just let herself give in to it. She knew he'd be ecstatic. They could be together again, end this awkwardness, and pretend things were all better._

_But she knew that, truthfully, if they couldn't get through these problems now, they had no future as a couple. The only possible road in_ that _direction lay in resolving all this messy painful business between them. They couldn't go around. They had to go through. She had no interest in half-assing anything, least of all a relationship where she needed stability._

_She'd need to be able to trust that he wouldn't hurt her heart again. And right now, she couldn't. Not after what had happened with Jessica. Not after the less pleasant sides of him she'd seen ever since they'd slept together._

_Besides..._

_He'd been the first person in a long time to caress her, tenderly, to touch her like she was precious. Like she was his whole world. Well, being honest, he'd been the first person_ ever _for that last one. She'd trusted him and let him close, and the physical comfort he'd given her had been like warm sunlight after dark winter._

_Then all of a sudden he'd snapped, and she'd been collateral damage, hand pressed to her throbbing mouth in disbelief._

_She could accept his apology— and had— while still being wary of that temper. Not_ scared _. Not of him. She never had been scared of him and the thought that she ever could be horrified her. But wary._

_But she didn't want it to always be like this between them, either. What a depressing thought. So. Maybe later._

_"Thanks," she added._

_They kept trudging across the bleak prairie. She turned her collar up against the wind. She felt a growing feeling of discomfort. She hoped that passed—_

_Seventeen steps later, she dropped to her knees and threw up._

Ick, ick, ick— _this was usually the part where she spat the remnants frantically out, flushed, and refused to look as modern plumbing carried everything out of sight, but here there was just grass—_

_Her hair was safely braided, but Wyatt grabbed her hat before it could—_ ew _— and then pulled up on her backpack, taking its weight off her shoulders._

_She did the frantic spitting thing and then sat back on her heels, throat burning, with that disgusting taste in her mouth. Wyatt handed her an open canteen. She rinsed her mouth out several times and then cautiously drank a few swallows. Would her stomach rebel?_

_When it didn't, she scooted backwards a few feet. She didn't need her own mess to trigger a fresh round._

_"Here." Wyatt maneuvered her backpack off of her one arm at a time._

_"Thanks," she muttered. "Oh, I hate that." She drank some more._

_He was searching his pack. "First aid kit's back at the Lifeboat—"_

_"No. We'd lose too much time going back. I'll be fine." One more swallow, then she capped the canteen and tried to stand. He helped her up and steadied her, hands on her shoulders._

_"You sure?"_

_"Yeah. Thanks." She shouldered her backpack again._

_"You think it was... something you ate?" he asked after several steps._

_"Yes." She knew exactly what it was. When the jump alarm had gone off again so soon, wrenching her out of much-needed sleep, she'd grabbed the first thing she could find in the refrigerator to eat as they briefed. That first thing had been leftovers just a little too old. She'd noticed the slightly off taste, but she'd had bigger concerns at the time._

_Then there was the fact that while Jiya was a competent pilot, she didn't have much_ experience _, and the rides had gotten even bumpier. Not a great combination._

_Wyatt was eyeing her. She glanced at him. He looked upset. He looked disbelieving and_ hurt _._

_It took her a minute to figure out why._

Seriously?

 _In 1941, when he'd pulled his mouth off her breast just far enough to mutter "We don't have—"_ _and she'd panted "It's fine" and they'd kept going—_

_Definitely not helpful memories. Oh, God,_ definitely _not. Her blood rushed south, and she didn't need that right now._

— _had he thought she'd meant_ I don't mind risking pregnancy _and not_ I have that covered?

_Or could he possibly be thinking—_

Seriously?

_She wasn't going to pretend that the idea of a one-night stand with Garcia hadn't briefly crossed her mind that first night she'd gone to his room, but she, you know, hadn't. Hopping from bed to bed like that worked for some people—_

— clearly—

_but she just wasn't one of them._

_"Yes. It was something I ate." She stared back at him until he looked away._

_Another— quarter mile? She honestly had no idea of distance here. "I miss Rufus," he muttered._

_She looked carefully sideways at him. "Me too," she admitted._

_"Kinda feels like he was the glue holding this whole team together."_

_That was a lot to put on Rufus, and when they got him back, they'd have to be careful to... not. But at the same time, she knew what he meant._

_"When we get him back," she said after a minute, "when you finally stop hugging him, what's the first thing you're gonna do?"_

_"The first thing_ he's _gonna do is probably hit me, and I'll deserve it."_

_"Wyatt."_

_"After Jiya— was, uh, kidnapped, he told me that if something happened to her he didn't think he could ever forgive me. And that was... fair. So..."_

_"Wyatt," she sighed. "Rufus loved Jiya. Of course he's going to be protective of her. That doesn't mean he's going to_ hit _you. I think we've had_ quite _enough of that already, thank you." She gave him a pointed sideways look, and when he opened his mouth to explain or apologize or in some other way derail the conversation, added, "Besides, you know that's not what I meant."_

_Wyatt was quiet for a while. Just when she'd decided he'd sunk into another guilty funk, he said, "Buy him every Chocodile in the state of Florida?"_

_Lucy was startled into laughing, and it felt good._

_"What about you?" he added._

_"You took mine," she admitted._

_He snorted, and if it wasn't a full laugh, well, it still felt good to hear that, too._

_"Maybe never let him out of my sight again?"_

_He made a wry face. "Pretty sure you_ and _he_ and _Jiya would all have a problem with that."_

_"... good point."_

_"Make sure he knows how much I,_ we _, all love him," she said quietly after a while._

_Wyatt looked sideways at her. "I think he knew that, Lucy."_

_"That's the kind of thing you always assume until you... find out you were wrong and it's too late to fix."_

_"Yeah," he said quietly. "I know."_

_They were very quiet._

_"Remember the time he stormed that Rittenhouse bastard's house with nothing but an empty musket?" Wyatt asked after a minute._

_"And the time he made a capacitor out of some wine bottles and foil."_

_"And the time he blew up a Nazi rocket."_

_"And the time he shot a Rittenagent."_

_"And the time he took the bullet out of my— sorry, sorry—"_

_Lucy had turned away and pressed her hand to her mouth, trying to breathe deep and slow. "I'm fine," she managed. "I'm fine."_

_"... you sure?"_

_She nodded, and fell into step beside him again._

_She felt him watching her sidelong. He didn't say anything, but he didn't stop watching._

_"Not exactly a great advertisement for my own cooking right now, am I?" she sighed._

_He snorted. "There's nothing wrong with your cooking."_

_"Only when I let it sit in the refrigerator for five days." She forcefully wrenched her thoughts onto another topic. "What about the time Rufus broke us all out of the Alamo?"_

_Short pause. "Or the time he helped save the moon landing."_

_"Or the time he waded into an angry mob of cops to protect suffragettes."_

_"Or the time he piloted us back from 1931 while, uh..." He looked sideways at her. "Hurt."_

_"You realize that, once we get him back, we're going to have to have this conversation_ with _him, right?" Because if they hadn't made sure that he knew_ they _knew how awesome he was before he died, they owed it to him to do it after they saved him._

_"It'll be worth it." Wyatt was actually smiling. She hadn't seen that in a while. Despite their surroundings, the cold, and the mission, she felt herself relax just a little._

The change in water temperature jarred Lucy back to the present. She'd stayed in here way too long. She rinsed quickly, dried off, and dressed. She'd check on Jiya, then start dinner. Something fresh for all of them. She was swearing off leftovers for a while.

#

After dinner, Lucy knocked lightly on Jiya's door and let herself in at the dull, listless "yeah?"

Jiya was sitting on the edge of her bed, just... staring into space, it looked like. "Hey," she said.

"I came to see if you needed help with anything before bed." Jiya was already in her pajamas, but she had a hairbrush and a tube of antibiotic ointment lying beside her. "Want me to brush your hair?"

Jiya sighed. "Sure."

Lucy sat behind her and gently started from the bottom up. Those Soviet hats had kept their heads warm, but hadn't done their hair any favors.

"I should have asked if you were okay going with Garcia," Lucy said after a few minutes. "I'm sorry."

"I mean, we had an awkward silence about it." Jiya's tired voice held a bit of humor. "It was fine. He... got me back safely." Pause. "You never told him about the second Houston trip?"

Second Houston trip— "Wait." Lucy's hands stilled. "You  _did_ tell him?"

"... it, um, came up."

Lucy was dying to ask. There was no  _way_ that subject just "came up." But Jiya wasn't saying anything else, which told Lucy she really didn't want to talk about it, and she'd had a hard enough day already.

"It wasn't really  _about_ him, I guess," Lucy said after a minute. "We would've done the same for any other innocent civilian. And Rufus and I didn't want to... I mean, the whole thing was pretty awful."

"Mmm."

Jiya didn't say anything more about that. Lucy could ask Garcia— he might even answer— but then she'd be revealing that Jiya had brought it up, and Lucy wasn't going to put Jiya in that position.

Lucy caught a snag. "Sorry."

"It's okay. I know it's thick. Thanks for... helping."

"Of course."

"These days," Jiya said after a minute, "the only thing keeping me from chopping most of it off is knowing I'd really stand out in pretty much any era we go to."

Lucy was glad she was behind Jiya, because that made it easier to hide her reaction. In this hothouse, she, too, had considered cutting her hair short. She wasn't, for the same reason as Jiya. But also because every time she thought about it, she pictured Lifeboat Lucy. Presumably she'd made the same decision, once.

Had Lifeboat Lucy ever been here, in this house?

"I bet you could rock a flapper bob, though," she said.

Lucy finished brushing Jiya's hair, helped her dab the ointment on the little red spots on her face, brought her some ice water with a straw, and said good night. She went to her own room, and collapsed heavily on her cot.

Garcia lowered the book he was reading, and looked at her.

"You know the worst thing about this mission?" she muttered after a minute.

"Let's see... we have no idea what Emma was doing? We almost, uh, died? Our pilot got frostbite?"

"... besides those."

He waited patiently, sort of.

"I'm actually grateful for this damned  _heat_ ."

"Mmm."

But he didn't go back to his book. After another minute or two, he related an abbreviated version of a conversation he'd had with Jiya. Not about Houston, but about Jiya's suspicion that Emma was from another timeline.

"Has she... is this a vision she's had?"

"You'd have to ask her."

Lucy had mentioned the possibility before, but it sounded like Jiya had put a lot more thought into it. "São Paulo Lucy... knew what had happened to your family."

"Yes."

"So whatever happened in her timeline, Rittenhouse still..."

He watched her steadily. After a minute he said, "Her timeline and our timeline were identical until that day in the bar. Otherwise when she went back, she would've ended up... somewhere else."

Lucy digested this. "And— and the journal said we worked together to fight them." Well, São Paulo Lucy and Garcia. Well, technically, São Paulo Lucy and an alternate Garcia—

_We._ We was simpler.

"But it wasn't enough. She came back to try to change things." Lucy sat up, considering. "Whatever happened in Lifeboat Lucy's timeline, she had to come back and try to change things, too. Somehow, each of them identified what they thought was the key moment when things went wrong. Rufus dying, that's obvious, but... why give you the  _journal_ ?"

"Because she needed someone to take the offensive sooner than it happened in her timeline."

Lucy looked at him. He'd used to call her alternate incarnation  _you_ . Now he said  _her_ . She didn't know if that was deliberate, but she appreciated it anyway.

"So if Emma..." Lucy tried to think this through. "Say she comes back from a future where she's losing badly enough that she thinks the intervention is necessary. But she still has access to a time machine." She considered. "What if someone builds more of them? What if there are a  _lot_ of time machines in the future?"

"In this future where Rittenhouse is losing badly enough that Emma takes a trip to intervene?"

That did imply that someone besides Rittenhouse built them. "So—" This was hard to follow. Time travel problems, indeed. "The date Anthony gave you to find her. Why then?"

"He wasn't sure when exactly she'd landed. To fake the logs convincingly— well, it wasn't just a matter of dropping her off."

"But he knew where?"

"No."

"Then how did you find her?"

Garcia hesitated. "The journal."

" _What?"_ Emma was in the journal? "You went back for her and you  _knew_ — no. But if  _I_ knew, why didn't I say..."

He shook his head. "There was a picture and a description of the cabin. She— Lucy— talked about where to find it, she said she was hoping to find someone there who could help. But she didn't name them."

What did that  _mean_ ? "How many times have we  _done_ this?" she muttered. "Are we just living this all over and over and over again?"

"It might not have been Emma there," he pointed out. "Maybe Emma really is from another timeline, and she found out other Lucy was looking there. Or maybe whoever was there was important enough to Rittenhouse that they went looking in both timelines."

Lucy struggled to process this. "Garcia, was I—  _Rittenhouse's_ historian in the journal?"

"You... started out that way."

She stared at him blankly. The implications of that hurt her head and her heart. "Where was my mother?"

"Sick."

She couldn't— she  _couldn't_ think about that right now. "So, the ten years wasn't determined by her, it was when Anthony thought it would be safe to go after her. So... maybe you really were her target all along."

"If I was her target, she did a damned good job." He sounded bitter. "She was isolating me, there at the end. She kept telling me my men were walking off, but in retrospect... she was either threatening them to get them to leave, or just killing them and hiding the bodies."

"And yet she still didn't make any move for the Mothership. She found you more of a threat than, what, a whole squad of soldiers?"

He seemed as unsettled by this idea as she was by knowing what her alternate timeline self had done. "I know we just tried to kill her, but... if I never pick her up, does Anthony succeed in blowing up the Mothership? Does Rittenhouse win then? With the Lifeboat?"

"We— Agent Christopher and I— were talking about blowing up the Lifeboat if Anthony blew up the Mothership."

"You  _were_ ?"

Lucy nodded.

"How did  _you_ know about it? Did Rufus tell you?"

Lucy looked at him. "What?"

"I know that Anthony called Rufus the day before I killed him. They met. It must have been about Anthony's plan—"

"In our timeline, Anthony never got a hold of Rufus because Rufus had taken Wyatt back to 1983 to keep Jessica's murderer's parents from ever conceiving him after you called Wyatt after 1893 and gave him the murderer's name."

Garcia looked taken aback. "Starting to see why you kept a journal."

"Anthony reached  _me_ . We met. He told me his plan. I told Denise, and... We would've done it."

Garcia was silent for a bit. "São Paulo Lucy seemed to believe in... choke points," he said finally. "She writes about them in the journal, certain... events that all timelines, or a bunch of related timelines, have to pass through. Maybe my picking up Emma, terrible as it is, is a choke point." He licked his lip. "Or maybe... not. She was the one to convince Anthony in the first place that we needed to destroy it." He considered, eyes narrowing.

Lucy flopped back on the cot. All she was getting out of this was convincing herself Emma really was from another timeline. And had somehow come here without ripping the universe apart. "Maybe in the future Rittenhouse gets the travel-in-your-own-timeline technology, too."

"There's a cheerful thought."

But wouldn't  _leaving_ someone in their own timeline destabilize a lot of things? Unless... Emma had hunted down her original self and killed her, leaving her as the only existing Emma.

Garcia was right. This was a cheerful thought, and they weren't getting anywhere with it.

He sat up. "Emma has a new pilot."

"What?"

"If she was there a decade, she can't go back to October 15th, 1880, without crossing her own timeline. Unless she was lying to me about that.."

Lucy shook her head. "In 1918 she said she lived ten years in Missouri. Oh my God, you're right."

"Although, again, she could have been lying."

"We know she was there in July of 1880," Lucy said. "That's when we were just there, and her stuff was in the cabin. What would she gain by lying?"

He shook his head.

"When could she have trained a new pilot?" Lucy added. "Connor said— Connor said it takes a while."

He'd tried to bring that subject up with her again tonight. Lucy had told him—

"... 1930," Garcia said.

" _What?_ "

"She dropped someone off in 1930 and picked them up again in 1931. A few days for us. Months for them."

Lucy had seen all the modern-day equipment in Emma's cabin, and she'd brought that in the Lifeboat with only Anthony to help her. Loading up the Mothership with supplies and leaving some of their surviving Rittenhouse agents to construct an entire off-grid bunker? That was plausible. Far too plausible.

"Oh God," she said weakly. "Should we go tell the others?"

"Let it wait until morning," he suggested. "We all need sleep. If she jumps again, we'll tell them then."

She nodded, and stared at the ceiling. "So they can go anywhere now. This new pilot doesn't have a timeline to cross in the past. They could even go back to Chinatown and kill us all."

"Only if we don't get out of the present in time."

"Sometimes we take hours to figure out their target," Lucy said. "I don't think we're going to have that luxury any more."

After a moment or two, he asked, "Yesterday was the Lifeboat's first offensive trip, right? Instead of playing defense all the time?"

"For... our side, yes." Wyatt's trip to 1983 had been... personal, and 1962 Houston—  _definitely_ not them.

He gave her a quick sideways glance, but didn't ask. "Keynes identified pressure points he wanted Rittenhouse to hit," Garcia said. "What if we did the same?"

Lucy paused, rolled over, and propped herself up on one elbow.

"Moments... in history. Chances to change things for the better." He watched her. "The Compromise of 1877," he suggested. "The Sioux Wars? The Trail of Tears?"

"We can track them but not vice versa," she muttered. "They would never notice we'd left."

It was a profound proposal. It should have horrified her. It would have, months ago, when this had all started. "I tried to warn Lincoln," she said abruptly.

"I... know."

She looked at him, and remembered every detail of that brief, searing encounter. "Why?" she asked quietly. "You can't— you  _can't_ — tell me he was Rittenhouse. Or Secretary Seward or General Grant, for that matter."

"Johnson was, though. And Grant was gonna bungle Reconstruction."

She just waited.

He looked away, and touched his tongue to his top lip. "Lucy, sometimes you ask me things and I know you're going to hate the answer, and... it's hard to tell you."

"But you're going to anyway," she said quietly.

He looked at her. "I thought if all four of them died, things would be turbulent enough that Rittenhouse would lose some of its grip on the country. I didn't know, the journal didn't say,  _who_ exactly was Rittenhouse in that era besides Johnson and some others. I was going to stay in the past and hunt them down as the chaos drove them out of hiding. Like rats on a sinking ship. I'm not, ah, saying it was my best plan."

"No," she said bluntly. "It was a terrible plan. It was just as likely to give Rittenhouse more power than less."

He just watched her. She knew she wasn't going to like what was coming.

"There's a page of the journal that says 'make sure Lincoln dies,'" he said quietly.

" _What?_ "

He hesitated. "Rittenhouse... saved him from John Wilkes Booth—"

" _WHAT?_ "

"And then had him publicly and horribly killed, and blamed Radical Republicans."

Lucy opened her mouth and closed it again. She fell back on the cot and stared at the ceiling. "I don't want to believe you."

He didn't say anything.

Didn't want to believe him... but, as an attempt to further Rittenhouse's agenda, it would have been horrifyingly effective. It would have torpedoed Reconstruction completely and turned public sentiment against the former slaves for a generation.

"You couldn't've saved him from Booth  _and_ Rittenhouse?"

"On my own? Without knowing who the conspirators were? Without doing something like kidnapping him and putting Johnson in power anyway?"

She didn't have an answer for that. She didn't want to think about any of this.

"If we find these pressure points," she said. "Wouldn't that make us like them? Making history over in our own image?"

"Ah... no." He licked his lips. "They want power for themselves. We want to give it to other people."

She stared at the ceiling. "The fact that what you're proposing doesn't horrify me,  _that_ horrifies me."

"It's... because you care about other people. You want the best for them. I... admire that about you."

She looked over at him.

"I think it's naive as hell, but I do admire the impulse."

"Did you hit your head today?"

He gave her a slightly reproachful look.

Okay, okay. "I told you I read your file," she reminded him after a minute. "I know I'm not the only one in this room who has that  _impulse_ ."

She expected a protest, but it was his turn to stare at the ceiling. When he finally spoke, his voice was even lower and rougher than usual. "Sometimes I think that Garcia Flynn died with his wife and child."

She sat up. "Garcia."

He looked over at her. "You don't understand, Lucy." His voice was gentle and sad.

"I know. I know I don't." She  _didn't_ understand what it was like to have your family murdered in front of you. "But I also know that what you said is still bullshit."

He watched her for a long moment, almost smiling.

Then thinking of  _family_ sent her down another thought path entirely. "My mom was sick in the journal?"

He nodded.

"So she met and married Henry Wallace. So they had Amy! Amy was still there in that timeline. Right?"

"They had Amy," he said carefully.

She knew him well enough, by now, that that care made her stomach sink. "And?"

He wouldn't make eye contact.

"Garcia."

Reluctantly, he looked up.

"What happened to my sister in the journal?" Even as she asked, she was already prepared for the answer, because she  _knew_ him—

"... Rittenhouse— killed her."

... Oh, God, she hadn't been prepared enough.

"Why? It had to be something to do with me, didn't it. Why else would they care?"

He looked at her helplessly.

"Tell me."

"Lucy, are you sure you—"

" _Stop asking me that and tell me_ ." Her voice cracked.

"Because you defected." His voice was flat.

Even after a day like today, that still hit her like a blow. "No.  _No._ " She sat up straight.

He watched her steadily.

"I would never— I don't believe you!" She was on her feet—

Never what? Never defy Rittenhouse as long as they had someone she loved? Never put the fate of the world over her own family?

He stayed seated, and just looked up at her.

She turned her back on him and leaned against the window. She stared out at the moss-draped oak tree, and the dark bulk of the scrub.

"If I had to make that choice," she said, more quietly, "I— I don't know that I could."

And he? What would he do if he had to choose between stopping Rittenhouse and saving his family? Did he ever wish he could go back in time and stop himself from flagging the suspicious transactions that had triggered the murders?

"I don't think she did," he said after a minute. "I think— it was retribution, not a hostage situation." His voice had turned dark. "She... wrote very little about it."

Had she said more than she'd wrote? To whom? Lucy knew Garcia could give her an idea, but she was frankly scared to learn any more tonight.

"I'm going to sleep," she said abruptly. Sleep? Ha. She was unlikely to get that lucky. But she could go to bed. "You need the light on?"

He turned it off, and they went to bed in silence.

#

She woke up happy in a way that felt... familiar, and yet long-missed. Why? She chased the thread of emotion, of she and—

Her dream.

She had a moment of disorientation, and then the pain hit.

The bed shifted. "Lucy?"

Damn it,  _Jiya_ would have slept through Lucy's own awakening. But her current roommate had the ears of a cat... or of a soldier who'd spent his entire adult life fighting.

"I just... dreamt about Amy. Sorry I woke you." There. She got it all out smoothly and evenly and they could go back to sleep.

Then the memory of happiness returned, and she pressed her hand to her mouth to keep that noise from coming out. Her eyes prickled and filled with tears. She sniffled. She sat up, drew her knees up, and buried her face in her arms.

She didn't like sounding like a lost, bewildered child. But when Dad had died— that pain had healed. Slowly. This was  _festering_ . Because she felt so guilty.

"It  _hurts_ ," she whispered.

She heard the bed rock, then two quick footsteps. "I know." His voice was quiet, rough, and close. "I know, Lucy."

She raised her head and turned to him. He reached for her, then stopped. She ungracefully scooted off the cot to join him on the floor, and turned her head so he couldn't see her face. She let him pull her into his arms, just like in Chinatown, and hold her against his chest.

At least this time he wasn't hurt. Neither of them were wearing anyone's blood.

"I'm sorry, Lucy," he managed unevenly. "I'm so sorry."

Oh, God. That did her in. She had a brief moment of wondering when exactly Garcia Flynn had become a safe person to cry against. Then her tears came in earnest, and just like in Chinatown, he stayed with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not expect that the experience of fleeing across the Sandhills in heavy boots would ever be relevant to a story.
> 
> Historical notes: The blizzards in this chapter are both real. A special shoutout to Dr. Barbara Mayes Boustead, whose [blog entry](http://www.bousteadhill.net/wilder_weather/?p=75) and dissertation both were very useful in writing about the 1880 storm. 
> 
> The Lost Company is fictional. The cacti are, unfortunately, very real.
> 
> And Flynn’s not a taxonomist, so let me clarify that bats are not rodents.


	5. The Body Electric, Boogie Woogie Woogie Woo!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Time Team meets some folks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: on-screen violence, death, blood, and tending of wounds; references to slavery, torture, and execution

Lucy climbed quietly down the ladder.

It was early. She'd woke Garcia getting up, but he'd closed his eyes again as she closed the door behind her. Jiya's door had also been closed; Lucy hoped she was sleeping. But the faint smell of coffee had pervaded the house, telling her someone was awake. And of the two remaining possibilities...

Connor was fiddling with something at the work bench. He gave her a polite smile as she descended.

She crossed the room to where he was sitting, and folded her arms across her chest. "I'll train as a backup pilot."

His smile widened.

" _If_ ," she added.

He raised his eyebrows.

"You modify the Lifeboat to carry a fifth person."

He frowned. "There's no room for a fifth seat."

"It doesn't have to be a seat. I'll hold on to a strap on the ceiling if I have to. I'm talking about the other modifications. The recalculations to make sure no one..."

"Ends up like Jiya," Connor finished for her.

Lucy nodded.

Connor cocked his head at her. "Why?"

Lucy was quiet for a moment. "These last few weeks... I'm not willing to lose them."

"I wasn't under the impression you'd been particularly enjoying these weeks. None of us have."

"No," she said. "But I've needed them." She didn't think she wanted to go down that conversational road. Still, she hesitated before going down a different one. "Why do you think it was Jiya?" she asked abruptly.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's not like the Lifeboat, or time itself, or whatever, 'knows' that Rufus and Wyatt and I were the regular travelers and Jiya was 'extra.' So... why do you think she's the one who ended up with...?"

"I've wondered that often," Connor admitted after a minute. "I don't know. Maybe because she's younger than the three of you, her brain is younger, it was more susceptible, somehow. Or maybe regular time travel does something to your brain, and for that reason the three of you were more resistant."

" _Maybe_ regular time travel does something to your brain? You don't know?"

"As far as I know it doesn't, but clearly something happened to Jiya that didn't happen to the three of you, and I don't—"

The jump alarm went off.

Lucy read over Connor's shoulder: "August 29 th , 1855."

"Near Philadelphia," Connor added.

Lucy was already searching. After all the ways in which history had changed, large and small, she no longer trusted her memory alone to come up with the answers.

She heard Connor repeat the Mothership's date and place as the other three hurried in. "Lucy?" Wyatt asked.

"Looking."

"I found a Philadelphia address in the pocket of a Rittenhouse agent," Garcia said. "Well, just a street name: Ronaldson."

Jiya swung into her chair and started typing. "The only Ronaldson street in Philly is way out in the 'burbs." She frowned at the screen. "Anything important happen at Swarthmore that year?"

"Hadn't been founded yet," Lucy said absently. "Today was— but what does that have to do with Ronaldson Street?"

"What does _what_ have to do with Ronaldson Street?" Wyatt asked patiently. Mostly.

"The trial. Of William Still, Isaac Moore, James Braddock, James Martin, John Ballard, and William Curtis. Still was an abolitionist, the clerk of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. The other five were dock workers. Six weeks earlier a man brought an enslaved woman, Jane Johnson, and her two sons into the city. Pennsylvania was a free state, so that meant they were free. These six helped the Johnsons escape, and they're tried today. Their white colleague was tried separately."

"Of _course_ they were put on trial for that," Wyatt muttered.

"Oh, it was a big deal. States were fighting over how to recognize or not recognize each other's slavery laws, plus the federal laws. The judge wanted to punish them for helping Jane and her children."

"So, does she go on to become a cause célèbre, or what?" Garcia asked. "Why would Emma go after her, specifically?"

"Um." That was the weak link in Lucy's argument. She stood, ran her hand through her hair, turned, sat down, and stood up again. "Why _Ronaldson_?"

"Maybe it's unrelated," Wyatt said. "Rittenhouse could've been planning a lot of things in Philadelphia."

"If they kill Jane," Lucy said, thinking out loud, "they deal the abolitionist movement a blow, but... if they want to change the precedent the case set, they... still wouldn't strike today." Focus. She needed to focus. Needed to sleep— the last two nights hadn't made up for Nebraska.

She needed to figure out why today was important. It was a linchpin. In what?

Of course. "William Still." She turned back to the others. "He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He organized and coordinated rescues, aided hundreds of former slaves, _and_ he kept detailed records of everyone he talked to and helped so that families could be reunited one day, when slavery was ended across the country."

"And he's on trial today," Garcia said.

"Yeah. He's supposed to be acquitted, but if he goes to prison, it'll be a huge blow to the Underground Railroad. Or the Vigilance Committee, as they were called in Philadelphia."

"He kept records?" Jiya asked.

"Yeah."

"Wasn't that dangerous?"

"Very. If they were found, all the freed people who'd settled in the United States instead of going on to Canada could be re-captured, not to mention all the abolitionists who could be charged."

"So maybe Rittenhouse is after those, too," Jiya said.

"Sounds like the kind of thing they'd love," Wyatt said. "So how does Emma make sure William goes to prison?"

"Jane," Lucy realized. "She sneaks back into the city and appears at the trial to testify that her master was lying about what had happened— he'd accused William of kidnapped her. It basically destroys the case, and William and three of the others go free. If they keep her from appearing..."

"Right," Wyatt said. "Let's go."

#

_Okay, you're just knocking on the front door of Lucretia Mott, world-famous abolitionist, feminist, all-around badass, and one of your heroes_ , Lucy told herself. _No big deal. Stay calm. Super, super calm._

To the young woman who answered the door, Lucy gave a bright smile and said, "Good morning. We need to talk to Mrs. Mott."

"Lucretia has several visitors this morning," the young woman said doubtfully, "but I'll see if she can receive you."

"Tell her it's about Jane Johnson," Lucy said, quietly, so no one on the busy street could hear.

The woman's polite demeanor faded into something far more serious. "I think you should wait inside." She let them into the front entry hall, and made it clear they should _stay_ there.

"I think that's the parlor where she waited to receive the angry mob," Lucy whispered to Garcia when the woman had gone.

"How does one _receive_ an angry mob?"

"Well, a friend of hers dissuaded them. But she was ready." She looked up at him. "I've told you she's a pacifist, right?"

"Only three times now."

"Just checking."

"Don't worry, Lucy. I promise, I won't shoot anyone in front of her for any reason less important than her scruples."

Lucy gave him a Look.

And then Lucretia Mott came quietly into the hall.

 _Calm_ , Lucy reminded herself. _Super, totally, absolutely calm_.

She looked at the tiny woman in front of her, dressed simply in sober green, with deep-set eyes and the mouth-lines that reflected a lifetime of smiling wryly. _Only one of the most important abolitionists ever. No big deal._

"You wanted speech with me?" she greeted them. "My time is somewhat short this morning, but if I can help you, I will."

"Actually, we were hoping we could help you," Lucy said. "Uh... help thee."

Lucretia's mouth twitched. "I am very used to speaking with those who are not Friends," she assured them. "Do not discomfit thyself on my account."

"We're here about Jane Johnson," Lucy said. "We know you intend to have her appear at William Still's trial today, and we think that others know, who are going to try to stop her from getting there."

Lucretia was stunned. "How can thou possibly have this knowledge?"

"You wouldn't believe us if we told you," Lucy said. "We— we come from far away, and it's common knowledge there. The point is, Jane is in danger. Has there been a red-haired woman skulking around here?"

"But how has thou come by this information?"

"God," Garcia said behind her.

Lucretia looked at him. Lucy also looked at him, hoping her surprise wasn't visible.

"God told us everything she's told you," he continued after a second, "and led us here."

Lucretia was taken aback, but at least she was easier to convince than Colonel Montgomery. As far as she knew, no one from her household had seen Emma. "From where is this threat that you foresee coming?" she asked them.

"We're not sure, but they may be planning to overtake Jane's carriage along the way, or else have the marshals guarding the outside of the courthouse. If you let us escort you, we can help."

Lucy fervently hoped it wouldn't come to a shoot-out in 1855 Philadelphia. She suspected Emma would be even more ruthless than any iteration of Rittenhouse she'd seen yet. Emma was targeting people who couldn't afford much official scrutiny of their lives, even if Emma herself failed to disrupt them. She was tying the Time Team's hands.

"If Emma sees us with them, she'll know which carriage they're in," Garcia murmured when Lucretia had stepped into the parlor to confer with her fellows. "We might do more harm than good."

He had a point— and it wasn't like he, in particular, blended in. Not only was Emma boxing them in tactically, she was making them do her work for her.

Lucy really wanted her dead.

"... is there a livery stable nearby?" she asked.

#

William's wife, Letitia, was apparently a dressmaker, so they only had to ask two people before they got directions to the house.

"Be careful," Lucy had warned them.

Wyatt had nodded.

"And I don't just mean for yourselves. If something goes wrong at the Still home? A lot of people could get in _a lot_ of trouble."

"Rittenhouse is probably counting on that," Wyatt had muttered.

The house was a narrow, red-bricked row house on... Ronaldson Street. "Must've changed names sometime in the last hundred and sixty years," Jiya murmured, nodding towards the street sign.

Well, at least they knew they were on the right track.

A girl in her teens opened the door— a servant, Jiya guessed. "Hello." Jiya smiled at her. "We're here to see Mrs. Still about a dress. Is she at home?"

The girl showed them into a sunny parlor where a woman was sewing. Near the window, a little girl was playing with her doll, and occasionally peeking into the cradle where a baby was burbling happily. Lucy had briefed them about the Still family as Connor prepped the Lifeboat, and she'd mentioned that in about twenty years one of their daughters would become one of the first Black female doctors in the country. Was that this girl? Maybe the baby?

Letitia greeted them politely. "Sarah said you're here to commission a dress?"

"Actually we're New York abolitionists, and we're here about your husband," Jiya said.

Letitia calmly resumed her seat. "Caroline, take young William upstairs," she said quietly. When the little girl had carried her brother out and closed the door behind her, Letitia said, "My husband is in court today."

"Yes, ma'am, we know," Wyatt said. "We're here to help. We know he keeps records about the people you help—"

Letitia made no sign of having any idea what he was talking about, just continued to watch him politely. But Jiya hated that they had to make Letitia think her family was in terrible danger.

"— and we think someone else knows, too," Wyatt said. "We're afraid they're coming here today."

"I'm sorry, I don't know to what you are referring, Mr...?"

"I'm Wyatt Logan, this is Jiya."

"I'm afraid I don't know anything about my husband's business. I can't help you." She gave them a very polite, very composed smile.

"His mother's name is Charity and she lives in New Jersey," Jiya said, "but it used to be Sidney. Your husband's father bought his freedom, but his mother had to escape from the Eastern Shore, from Saunders Griffin." Lucy had given them some helpful historical facts for this very situation, but, watching Letitia's polite smile vanish, Jiya hated having to use them.

"Someone sent us who knows him very well and cares about what happens to him," Jiya went on rapidly, desperate to convince her. "Mrs. Still, we are not here to hurt _anyone_. We're here to help."

"We're not asking you where his papers are," Wyatt added. "We just need to stay here in case these people come."

"No one would find anything here."

Jiya had to admire that careful ambiguity. "Please. Just let us help. It's more important than you know."

After a moment, Letitia rose carefully. "Excuse me a moment. I must speak with Sarah about supper."

Wyatt tensed, clearly expecting Letitia to bolt. But Jiya knew she wouldn't. Letitia was clearly not the type of woman to run from anything. She merely went to the door, had a quiet, brief conversation with Sarah, and returned.

"I don't know who you are or where you're from," she said, "but you are welcome to the hospitality of our home for the afternoon. I must get these seams finished today, but you may sit in here with me. I only ask that you don't say anything to my customers or guests."

"No, of course not," Jiya said.

Wyatt frowned. "Mrs. Still, do you have a back door?"

Letitia was clearly not too pleased to have them sitting in the kitchen at the back of the house instead of under her eye, but she went along with it. Jiya was pretty sure that if either of them tried to go anywhere else, Sarah would tell her mistress before they could get more than a foot out the door.

When they came in, they found Sarah chatting with a boy as she worked. "I'm Joe," he told them, doffing his cap politely. Sarah gave him a pointed look when he started to put his hat back on, and he hastily dropped it on the chair.

Jiya and Wyatt waited on either side of the little alcove that sheltered the back door. Awkwardly. Their entrance had killed Sarah and Joe's conversation, though the boy stayed. Something about him was catching Jiya's attention, but she couldn't figure out what.

"How long do you think we'll have to wait?" she murmured to Wyatt.

He shook his head. "We could be wrong about them coming here. They might all go to the courthouse."

Sarah didn't pause in her work, but Jiya saw that catch her attention. She was quiet for a minute. "Can I be asking what courthouse, sir?"

"Mr. Still's trial," Jiya told her. "If, hypothetically, there were an important surprise witness coming to the trial, then, also hypothetically, our, uh, the people we have information about might be very interested. Unfortunately."

She assumed that any servant the Stills kept in their household was completely trustworthy— and from the sidelong glance Sarah gave her, she concluded Sarah was also in the know about Jane.

"I suppose we have to trust to Providence," Sarah murmured after a minute, with a little almost-smile that suggested the Stills, and Jane's other allies, had gone to some effort to aid Providence. "If, as you say, miss, there is such a witness."

#

The closed carriage rattled over the Philadelphia cobblestones. Lucy remembered, way back in high school, feeling faintly contemptuous over an account by a wealthy Chicago socialite who described a carriage ride as 'absolutely shattering.' Of course travel was exhausting, but it wasn't _that_ bad.

Lucy's attitude had changed just as soon as she'd realized that tires hadn't been invented yet. Still, nothing brought home the realities of 19 th  century transportation like experiencing it for yourself.

She looked through the narrow carriage window just long enough to check that Garcia was still riding beside the carriage on guard. How the hell he'd found that _horse_ , a fiery chestnut proportioned roughly like he was, in a _livery_ stable, she had no idea.

Another reality of 19 th  century transportation: the spaces were small, and enclosed. Modern cars had plenty of glass, so she never noticed their proportions. But this carriage was giving her mindful breathing a good workout. Lucretia had asked if she wanted company, but Lucy didn't want to put any of them in more danger than they already were.

They had to be nearing the courthouse. God, Lucy didn't like this helpless feeling at all. She would've much rather ridden outside, with Garcia. But they'd tried to hire two different drivers to drive their carriages empty to the courthouse, and each time been turned down as potentially dangerous lunatics. Someone had had to go inside.

She'd just have to depend on Garcia, as she had before, until she could take matters into her own hands.

She heard the driver's _whoa_. The carriage slowed. She tensed.

She heard rapidly approaching footsteps.

"Go!" Garcia yelled.

The carriage sprang forward so abruptly that she was thrown into the opposite seat. Pain blossomed across her side and leg. She picked herself up only to be tossed down again. She crouched on the floor, bracing herself against both seats as best she could. For the horses to take off like that, Garcia must have... intervened.

Were those hoofbeats pursuit, or Garcia, or both? The carriage took a sharp turn, and she nearly went headfirst into the door. Oh God. This was terrible.

The horses jolted again. At least they were getting the potential fighting away from the courthouse. But—

Should she be more frightened? Had she just become numb?

A tumultuous slowing, and then the carriage stopped. Lucy scrambled up onto the seat, wondering what her life had come to that she was wishing she had a gun.

Men were shouting outside. One of them was Garcia. She made out the words "maniacs" and "action of law" before the carriage door flew open and a man stuck his head inside.

He looked considerably taken aback to see her. "Where is she? Uh... madam."

"Where is _who?_ " Lucy demanded.

"The— the, that is, Mrs. Johnson—" His head disappeared.

Garcia interrupted him in tones of purest outrage. " _As I have been telling you_ , there is no one in that carriage besides my poor, terrorized wife!" He leaned in and held out both hands to Lucy. "Oh thank God. I thought you'd be shaken to pieces."

Taking his outstretched hands as a sign that it was relatively safe outside, Lucy let him help her out. They were surrounded by men; most of them looked like US Marshals, but some were Philadelphia police. Two well-dressed ladies stood on the edge of the fray— presumably one of the carriages left at an awkward angle across the road was theirs.

 _Poor, terrorized wife?_ That, Lucy could do. She shrunk artfully against Garcia and moaned quietly.

"You see what you have done?" Garcia sounded truly incensed. "My wife is in a _delicate condition_ , and there's no _telling_ —"

One of the policeman was biting on his cheek to keep from smiling. Lucy knew that the cops hadn't welcomed what they saw as the intrusion of the Marshals in this case— in fact, assuming Emma didn't succeed in changing anything, Mrs. Johnson would make her escape from the Marshals in a high-speed carriage chase with a police escort.

"— told that Philadelphia was a city of rogues and scoundrels, but _this_ —"

A gunshot. Garcia swung her behind him and pushed her down. The Marshal a foot to his right fell to the cobblestones. The other men scattered— Garcia ducked down next to the carriage—

More shots. The two women and one of the cops joined them there. The Marshals and cops returned fire. The shots kept coming from up the street. Lucy suddenly found herself back on the porch in 1888 as Emma opened fire— Rufus tumbled to the ground—

She snapped out of it when the firing stopped. A man darted away from a storefront a block away and vanished around a corner.

"Stay here," Garcia told her. He swung into the chestnut's saddle and cantered up the street, but the accidental carriage blockade. The carriage horses were uneasy from the gunshots, taking little steps from side to side, and trying to weave between them would be hazardous. By the time the drivers could move, the shooter would be gone.

Garcia nudged his mount in a tight turn, came back towards them, then turned again, galloped down the street, and jumped the lowest carriage.

The younger woman gasped. Lucy watched him go and just hoped it wasn't a trap.

"What magnificent hindquarters," the younger woman mused. Lucy gave her a dirty look, and only realized her mistake when the other woman looked bewildered.

The older woman— they looked like mother and daughter— coughed. "Is that your husband, my dear?"

"Ah... yes."

"We saw them chasing you. You poor dear, you must be terribly shook up."

Lucy smiled politely and tried to look suitably harrowed.

"Have you been married long?" the older woman asked.

"Ah, no. This was... meant to be our wedding trip, actually." Lucy belatedly remembered she was in a delicate condition. "We had to delay it for half a year because of my husband's employment."

An escalating argument between one of the cops and one of the Marshals saved her from having to expand on her cover story any more: "That man shooting was the same one you told us told _you_ the carriage had a fugitive slave!" the cop was saying.

"His information was credible—"

"It's a nice thing when ruffians off the street can recruit US Marshals to do their dirty work," a second cop said. "It's clear they wanted this couple chased. Probably wanted them to get lost so they could rob them."

More gunshots from up the street. Lucy tensed. The older woman put a hand on her arm. For a second, Lucy was terrified she was a sleeper—

No. That didn't make any sense. This was just a human gesture of sympathy.

Right?

"Ladies, get off the street!" One of the cops moved in front of them.

"Not without my husband," Lucy snapped.

The shots stopped.

After a minute, hoofbeats came back in their direction. One of the drivers had managed to move his carriage, so she could see Garcia coming up the street with a body slung across his horse's withers. The younger woman bit back a shriek. The cops looked startled.

He stopped in front of the closest Marshal, shoved the body to the ground, and dismounted. "This hooligan comes towards us outside the courthouse, and you ask why we fled?" he demanded.

"Mr. Thompkins, we ordered you to halt," the most senior Marshal said.

"I heard _nothing_ of the sort—"

"All right, all right, enough," the most senior policeman said. "Unless you intend to charge this fellow, I say we let them go about their business and be about ours. Which _isn't_ pursuing innocent ladies on the pretense that they're escaped slaves." He straightened his jacket with a pointed little jerk.

A little more indignant outrage from Garcia in response to any inconvenient questions, and they were allowed to leave. Their carriage driver had escaped at the first opportunity, so one of the cops found them another. Garcia solicitously handed her in, and they returned to the courthouse.

"You definitely missed your calling on the stage," Lucy murmured to him as they ascended the steps.

He gave her a pleased little smile. "Sorry for, ah, putting you in a delicate— mm." He bit back his smirk and tried again. "For creating the fiction of your delicate condition."

She didn't respond to that, as they'd reached the gallery. She looked down...

Below she saw three women, one in a distinctive Quaker bonnet, surrounding another woman who wore a heavy veil. She looked up and gave Garcia a tiny nod. Jane had gotten inside.

Lucy felt a grim satisfaction. They'd taken their weakness and turned it against Rittenhouse. Emma wasn't the only one who could perform tactical judo.

But Lucy had to assume Emma was waiting in the wings with the next part of her plan. So Lucy watched carefully, instead of letting the trial absorb her attention.

And she wanted to let it. There sat William Still, with his attorney, the best the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society could get for him. He looked calm and collected. To a man who regularly sheltered fugitives in his own home, who coordinated and financed intricate rescues and other efforts to get ex-slaves to Canada, who confronted slaveowners when they brought "their" enslaved people into the state, and who kept a set of records that could land himself, his family, and his nearest associates in prison, this trial must have been in keeping with the work he'd chosen for his life's work.

The _Underground Railroad Records_ had been one of the first primary sources Lucy had discovered, back when she was fourteen or fifteen. She'd stayed up until two or three in the morning reading the first half of it, and William's words had brought the abolitionist movement to life for her. She'd gone from thinking of the Underground Railroad as a physical collection of safe houses, to understanding it as an active network of brave people who pitted their lives and their fortunes against an overwhelmingly large enemy.

In other words, a resistance movement.

And there was Colonel Wheeler, the minister to Nicaragua, who'd had the arrogance to assume the people he considered his property would stay with him out of loyalty even when brought to a free state. Having been proved very wrong, he was now venting his ire on William and the others.

"... no further questions," the prosecutor said.

Lucy straightened up. That was the second witness for the defense. Jane was supposed to be called next.

After the usual shuffling of papers and people, the bailiff called, "Jane Johnson!"

Wheeler glanced around the room, bored and slightly contemptuous.

The woman next to Lucretia rose, and put back her veil. "Here," she called.

The courtroom erupted in hubbub. Wheeler looked stunned, then immediately apoplectic. A Marshal against the far wall took one step forward, then stopped; from the wall directly underneath the gallery, a number of Pennsylvania court officers came forward. Two of them took up pointed stances near the Marshals; two more escorted Jane to the witness stand.

"She is a fugitive from the—" a man began— the District Attorney, Lucy guessed— but the judge gaveled him down, and quieted the room.

"My name is Jane— Jane Johnson," she began, when she'd been sworn in. "I was the slave of Mr. Wheeler of Washington. He bought me and my children two years ago— two of my children. I have one other child, in Richmond. I haven't seen him for two years, and I don't expect to ever see him again."

The courtroom was riveted.

"Mr. Wheeler brought me to Philadelphia on the way to New York, to wait on his wife, and brought my children, too. He told me as we traveled not to talk to anyone, and to tell anyone who asked that I was a free woman. But I was _not_ a free woman, though I wanted to be."

"I managed to tell that to a colored man in the hotel. I spoke to him through the keyhole, because Mr. Wheeler locked me in. The porter said he'd telegraph to New York, and someone would meet the boat and help me. But when we were on the boat in Philadelphia, this gentleman—" She gestured to William. "Approached me. He beckoned to me, but Mr. Wheeler was beside me, and I was afraid to go. This gentleman and a white gentleman approached us, and asked if I wanted to be free."

"I told them, 'I do, but I belong to this gentleman and I can't have my freedom.'"

"He said, 'Yes, you can! Come with us now!'"

"The white gentleman and some of the porters stayed and spoke with Mr. Wheeler, but Mr. Still and I, and the children, and the other porters, went on shore. One of the porters carried my son Daniel for me until we reached a carriage. But that was all: nobody forced me away, nobody pulled me, and nobody led me. I went away of my own free will. I always wished to be free, and meant to be free when I came North. My children and I have been comfortable and happy since I left Mr. Wheeler— and I had rather _die_ than go back."

Jane looked across at William, who had watched her steadily the whole time. He inclined his head towards her. He had helped her win her freedom, and now she had walked willingly back into danger to help protect his.

"What now?" Garcia murmured, yanking Lucy back to her reality as a time-traveling history defender.

"Uh, the Marshals and the District Attorney try to seize her when she leaves, but the abolitionists and the police get her away." Jane had already done her damage to the case against William; if Emma attacked her now, could she accomplish anything besides vindictiveness? Was there an angle here Lucy couldn't see?

The Marshals outside the courthouse had definitely been Rittenhouse's intervention, and the man who'd attacked them on the street definitely an agent. But was that all Emma had planned?

"Then let's make sure that still happens."

They slipped out of the gallery as the lawyers were questioning Jane. A knot of grim-looking Marshals had clustered outside the courtroom, waiting.

"You again!" Garcia said, in outraged tones.

One of the Marshals turned and looked at him. "Mr. Thompkins—"

Garcia brushed through the crowd like a hot knife through butter, Lucy in his wake, and approached the man who seemed to be in charge. He hadn't been there at the end of the carriage chase. "These _officers_ ," Garcia told him, emphasizing the word with awful irony, "pursued my wife and I nearly a quarter of a mile not two hours ago!"

"Mr. Thompkins—" The Marshal who _had_ been there sounded aggrieved. The man in charge seemed more inclined to pay attention to the courtroom door.

"On the grounds that we had the temerity to slow our carriage, and then, when approached by some rough-looking characters who later _shot_ at us, took ourselves to safety!"

Garcia escalated his indignation until he had the attention of all the Marshals. They clearly were reluctant to trifle with him. While public opinion would have condemned them much more strongly for laying hands on Lucretia and the other abolitionists, small women that they were, than for bringing any charges against Garcia, they seemed more concerned with basic self-preservation. Lucy made sure to cover the public opinion angle, too, by clinging to Garcia's arm and shrinking against him whenever any of them so much as stepped towards him. A year ago, living up to the most exaggerated stereotype of a helpless 19 th  century middle class white woman would have grated on her. Now, she didn't particularly mind weaponizing their misogyny.

A knot of Philadelphia policemen swept out of the courtroom. In their midst, Lucy could barely make out Lucretia's bonnet and Jane's veil. Distracted as they were by Garcia, the Marshals didn't realize what was happening until the exiting party was nearly at the outside door, with momentum on their side.

The senior Marshal gave Garcia a startled, scathing look. For a minute, Lucy thought he was going to arrest them. The cops strategically bunched up at the door, letting the abolitionists through first, so that by the time the doorway cleared, the first carriage was away and four more officers were piling into the second.

"Oh!" Lucy strategically sagged against Garcia. "Oh, I feel so... unwell..." she said in die-away tones.

Garcia was instantly solicitous. Lucy wasn't at all sure the Marshal believed her, but with one last scorching glance and a contemptuous wave of his hand, he dismissed them and turned away.

Lucy kept up the pretense of sudden weakness as Garcia retrieved the chestnut from the boy he'd paid to hold him, put her into a carriage, and gave the driver the address. They returned through the front door of the Mott household just as Jane was hurrying out the back door with various companions.

"Thou has had no meal today!" Lucretia exclaimed. She knelt in front of the fire, scooped several small potatoes into her apron, bustled into a small room, returned with a handful of apples and some thin biscuits, and hurried out the back door with them.

Lucy smiled. Some parts of the historical record had clearly been preserved.

They heard the rattle of the carriage driving off, and then Lucretia and her companions— J. Miller McKim and Sarah Pugh, if Lucy recalled correctly— came back inside.

Lucretia saw Lucy and Garcia waiting, and excused herself from the others, who went into the parlor.

"Will she be safe now?" Garcia asked, when Lucretia had come up to them.

"Yes. The Marshals will not find her now. The officers will not let her be taken tonight, and by tomorrow she'll be... away." She gave them a speculative look. "Your red-headed woman seems not to have materialized, but your assistance was gratifying."

Lucy said something non-committal.

When Garcia had gone to return his horse, Lucretia gave Lucy a shrewd look. "Where art thou from? Truly?"

Lucy hesitated. "In your lifetime, the railroad and steamships have made it possible to travel farther distances, faster, than your ancestors ever dreamed of," she said. "In our time... It becomes possible to cross time as well. My... companion and I are from the year 2017."

It was impossible to read Lucretia's expression. She continued to study Lucy. "Such a long time away," she said finally. "Are our friends free?"

"You see abolition in your lifetime," Lucy said bluntly.

Lucretia's eyes widened. Her mouth opened before she pressed her lips together against some strong emotion.

Lucy knew she didn't need to add, _but keep fighting!_ Not to Lucretia Mott.

"And I know the vote isn't— I mean, won't be— your primary concern, for women, but I've voted in every election since I was an adult," Lucy added. "I'm a professor. My friend is a... policewoman. Another friend is a, um, a scientist."

"Then why did thou travel here?" Lucretia asked finally.

"Because of you," Lucy told her. "And Jane, and William. Because you're important. Lucretia, all of you do so much good for so many people." Lucy nearly teared up.

Lucretia hesitated, then nodded once.

"You can't tell anyone," Lucy warned her.

"Yes, that could cause trouble, could it not?" Lucretia's mouth curved up as her expression focused somewhere far away. Then she seemed to snap back to herself.

Garcia returned, and looked between the two of them, a little puzzled.

"Goodbye," Lucy told Lucretia, suddenly feeling a sharp sense of loss at the prospect of leaving this woman she'd met only hours before.

"Fare you well," Lucretia told them. "In _all_ your travels."

Lucy felt a little melancholy as they headed back towards the Lifeboat. "Why'd you tell her you saw Jane in a vision?" she asked Garcia after a few minutes.

Scanning the rooftops and the windows for any sign of trouble, it took him a moment to respond. "I suppose it seemed as close to the truth as we could get, in spirit if not letter."

"I told her the truth," Lucy admitted.

"You _what?_ "

"She's... an amazing woman, and a heterodox one. I thought she'd be able to understand." She paused. "And... she did."

Garcia studied Lucy for a moment before turning his attention back to their surroundings. Lucy didn't pretend not to know why, but she didn't want to think about the distance between the Lucy he'd met at the Hindenburg, and the person she was now.

She definitely didn't want to think about the implications for future Lucy. Future Lucys.

#

They didn't really talk. Jiya wasn't sure what they could say without betraying that they were from the 21st century. Besides, she'd gotten used to keeping her mouth shut, when necessary, back in the 1880s.

After a while, Sarah and Joe started chatting again. Mostly desultory remarks about the weather and the city. Jiya tried to pass the time by figuring out what was puzzling her about Joe.

How long would the trial last? Lucy hadn't told them. And there was no guarantee things wouldn't change, any—

Commotion in the front of the house.

She stiffened as Sarah frowned and hurried out of the kitchen. Wyatt motioned for Jiya to get out of sight somewhere, and slipped around the edge of the kitchen, flattening his back against the narrow wall that separated the room from the rest of the house. She looked for a place to hide—

"In the parlor with your mistress," came Emma's voice. "Do as we say, and no one will get hurt."

Jiya pressed herself up against the wall on the other side of the door from Wyatt. Indistinct talk, then the sound of a door shutting. Were Caroline and young William with their mother, or were they upstairs? They must be in the parlor; otherwise Letitia would be raising hell.

"You, keep the woman and her kids in the parlor," Emma said. "You, with me. We'll start on this floor. You, upstairs. The Boy Scouts should all be down at the courthouse, but if they show up, kill them. Leave Lucy alive if you can, but kill her before you let her escape."

Jiya tried to count the number of people. At least three besides Emma.

And where and when had Joe vanished?

Wyatt was mouthing something to her, but Jiya couldn't understand. She thought, hoped, it was something along the lines of _try to get the Stills and Sarah out before Emma realizes she has hostages_.

"Start with the kitchen." Emma's voice was closer. "Secure the back door while you're at it."

Jiya looked around for a weapon. Why hadn't she demanded one of Flynn's guns again? The knife Sarah had been using was on the counter, and it would be better than nothing, but she couldn't reach it without coming into view in the hall.

"What if it's in the parlor?" a gruff male voice asked.

"I doubt it would be. Mrs. Still runs a dressmaking business and strangers are in and out of that room all day. We'll search there last if we have to. I'd rather the kids not get caught in the crossfire."

The footsteps came closer. Jiya locked eyes with Wyatt, and suddenly realized that if he tackled whoever came through that door, they'd both plunge straight into her. She pointed at herself, tilted her head to her left—

The man's very modern silencer came through the door first. Jiya paused just half a heartbeat, then lunged for Sarah's knife. The man's gun tracked towards her— and then Wyatt slammed into him and the shot went wide, hitting the cabinet.

Jiya grabbed the knife and crouched low against the wall— Wyatt and Emma's goon rolled over and into the cabinet— The other man pinned Wyatt—

"Stand down or we open fire in the parlor!" Emma yelled.

Wyatt suddenly went limp under the other man. No, the other man was the one who— wait, necks didn't _work_ like that—

"I'm coming out!" Wyatt called, struggling out from under the dead body. "Just don't shoot any of them."

He slid his gun into view of the doorway, then straightened up and carefully stepped out. If Emma shot him right away—

Apparently responding to some gesture of hers, Wyatt stepped forward. The toe of his trailing foot nudged the gun towards Jiya, and then he was through the doorway.

"Where are the others?" Emma asked.

Wyatt didn't say anything.

"Do you want me to start with the children?" Emma demanded.

"... they're at the courthouse."

"Really," Emma said. "I thought you guys preferred to work in pairs."

"Yeah," Wyatt said evenly. "We did."

"In the doghouse for letting a Rittenhouse spy infiltrate the bunker, huh?" Emma's warmth and sympathy sounded almost genuine, which just made it creepier. "Don't worry. Jessica and your kid are doing fine. Too bad you won't live long enough to meet it when it's born, but... we'll take good care of it for you."

Jiya just needed her to have turned slightly away from the doorway, and from the sound of their voices—

"Want to know if it's a boy or a girl?" Emma continued. "And what she decided to name—"

Jiya lunged forward, grabbed Wyatt's gun, and shot the goon guarding the parlor door.

She hit the floor as Emma returned fire, then yanked herself out of the doorway as Wyatt leapt for Emma. But—

Jiya had miscalculated. She'd assumed Emma would focus on Wyatt, the greater physical threat.

But Jiya was the team's only _pilot_.

A commotion in the hall— a loud _thump_ , grunting— told Jiya Emma's third goon had arrived to keep Wyatt busy. She didn't think Wyatt had had a chance to grab the dead goon's gun, either.

Then Emma was raking the doorway with bullets. Jiya tried to count the shots— Flynn had been telling her how many bullets different guns held— but she couldn't keep track and, frankly, she had no idea what kind of gun Emma had, even if she could've remembered Flynn's lesson—

"Put the gun down, Jiya!" Emma called, to a background accompaniment of grunts and crashes from the hall. "We're just going to talk."

Jiya tightened her grip on the pistol, and waited.

Emma stopped just on the other side of the doorway. "Or, if you prefer, I can go back and get one of the ladies in the parlor, and see if that persuades you."

To do that, she'd have to retreat backwards across the same hall where Wyatt was currently, by the sound of it, fighting for his life. As long as Wyatt could keep that Rittengoon occupied, Sarah and the Stills were safe.

A quiet, retreating footstep was Jiya's only warning before Emma flipped through the doorway— _firing_ — Jiya ducked, and snapped off a desperate shot that hit the wall as Emma landed halfway into the kitchen— Wyatt's silencer was throwing off Jiya's aim— her gun tracked towards Emma—

Emma rolled and came up, her own gun pointed firmly at Jiya. "Drop it!"

Jiya suspected that Emma would be less willing to kill her than she'd been to kill Wyatt, because of Jiya's potential usefulness, but she wasn't going to stake her life on her understanding of Emma's mental processes. Caught in an awkward crouch against the wall, she lowered her gun.

Emma stood. "Kick it out through the doorway."

The opening cabinet door threw Emma off her feet as Joe erupted from under the counter. A bullet hit the wall past Jiya's head— Jiya grabbed her gun— Joe grappled with Emma, pinning her gun hand near her leg— Jiya lunged for that gun— Emma kicked her solidly in the gut, sending her backwards— Emma fought to bring her wrist up—

Jiya lunged forward again, this time shoving open the cabinet door in front of her to deflect Emma's kick. She wrenched Emma's gun out of her hand and kicked it out of reach. Joe was desperately hanging on, but Emma had the advantage of two inches, twentieth-century nutrition, and combat proficiency.

Emma threw him off and lunged for Jiya's own gun. She grabbed Jiya's wrist and twisted hard. Jiya's hand opened of her own accord. She fumbled with the gun, yanked her hand free, and brought her other hand up, knifepoint at Emma's throat.

Emma froze.

"This seems appropriate," Jiya said.

"Jiya," Emma began.

Was it even worth trying to take her alive? On the other hand, if Jiya killed her here in the Stills' kitchen, that could make a lot of the trouble Lucy had—

Jiya dimly heard the front door open, but couldn't look. Emma darted backwards, grabbed Jiya's left hand, twisted, and yanked the knife free. She tossed the bucket of scraps towards Jiya's face, fouling her aim— Jiya wiped her face free— Emma dove for the back door—

Jiya tackled Joe to the ground as Emma flung the knife back towards them. Jiya scrambled to her feet again and raced for the back door, eased it open an inch—

When she opened it all the way, Emma was gone.

 _Damn it!_ "I should've killed her!" she bit out, though there was no one to hear.

She hurried back inside just in time to see a tall, broad-shouldered white man with a magnificent mustache hit the third Rittengoon across his back with an ornate cane, giving Wyatt the breathing room to kill the goon. What?

Jiya offered Joe a hand off the floor. "Thank you."

"Didn't do it for you," Joe said. Joe hesitated. "If they take Mr. Still's records... I'm in there. And there is no power in this world that could make me go back."

Jiya thought about asking if escaping the South was the reason Joe was masquerading as a boy, but decided it was none of her business. "I don't... think they took anything." She continued into the hall, where Wyatt and the big man were looking at each other suspiciously.

"Where the devil is Mrs. Still?" the big man demanded.

Wyatt pointed as he reholstered his gun. "They locked them in the parlor."

"And who the devil are you?"

The parlor door opened. "They're the ones I sent you the message about," Letitia said.

Sarah, behind her, was wide-eyed, but Letitia, with Caroline hiding behind her skirts, looked steely.

"Then who are all these other people?"

"They came for Mr. Still's records," Jiya said. "You need to move them."

Letitia and the big man exchanged significant looks, and then looked at Jiya and Wyatt.

"Fine, you don't want to do it while we're here," Wyatt said. "But I'm not leaving until there's someone else here who can look after you if she comes back."

"We have some friends," Letitia said after a minute.

So they waited. Wyatt and the man, who eventually relaxed enough to introduce himself as Dr. Childs, took care of the bodies while Jiya watched for trouble. Every gun Emma and her goons had brought had a silencer, so no one seemed to have noticed the fight.

Sarah resumed her work in the kitchen, but now Joe sat on the counter beside her with a large knife. Letitia moved her work to a chair in the hall, the fireplace poker under her seat.

Joe looked across the narrow kitchen at Jiya. "Where'd you learn to fight like that?" Joe said. "Your husband teach you?"

Is that what they thought she and Wyatt looked like? Thinking of Rufus, and of Jessica— though she'd rather not— she wanted to laugh. She'd be glad to be back in the twenty-first century, where flush toilets and cross-gender friendships were both a thing. "... he taught me," she said after a minute, and left it at that.

Wyatt and Dr. Childs returned. Letitia seemed relieved to see them both. Wyatt locked the front door behind them, then came to check the back door. "Any sign of trouble?"

Jiya shook her head. "No sign of Emma, anyway." She felt herself scowl. "I _had_ her, and she got away."

"You did the best you could." Wyatt sounded tired.

Jiya didn't bother arguing him. Whether she'd really done her best would be between her and the backs of her eyelids, on her next sleepless night. Instead, she hesitated, then asked, "Are you okay?"

He looked at her, puzzled. "I'm fine."

"No, I mean... with what Emma said."

His mouth tightened. "It's not real, Jiya," he said. "She just wants to mess with my head. And I'm not going to let her."

Fair enough.

Four other abolitionists showed up shortly after that. Wyatt clearly didn't like the idea of leaving, but Letitia was just as clearly not going to move William's records in front of them, so the sooner Jiya and Wyatt left, the sooner the records would be safe.

"I still have no idea who you are or where you came from, with those strange guns," Letitia told them. "But I appreciate what you did for us." She'd relaxed some once the bodies were out of her house.

Wyatt made a self-deprecating face. "Just hide those records." He grabbed his hat, and hesitated. "You know, you don't have to tell me," he said after a minute. "But... it's dangerous to keep them at all."

Letitia looked at him with a little smile. "You want to know why?"

Wyatt shrugged.

Letitia looked at Jiya. "How you knew about his mother, I don't know, but you left out one thing: she ran twice. The first time, she took all her children, but they were caught. The second time... she had to leave her two older boys behind. She even had to leave one of her girls on the road, but luckily, William's father found her. They settled down together and had more children— including William— but they never saw their boys again."

"When William first became the clerk... a man came for help. His name was Peter. He'd bought his freedom, but he was born a slave in Maryland. His father purchased his freedom, his mother escaped, but he and his brother and grandmother stayed behind."

Letitia was staring into the middle distance. "Peter and Levin were sold, farther south. Grew up together, passed from owner to owner. Levin was whipped to death by his master, but Peter... he managed to buy his freedom. And came here, which is where William met him, asking for help."

Letitia had tears in her eyes now. "When William heard it, he knew. He was Peter's brother, that Peter never knew about." Letitia smiled at them. "That's when he started keeping the records. So that one day, when freedom comes for everyone... families can find each other again."

Jiya felt like she'd been punched by the combination of horrifying evil and undaunted hope in that story. History books were one thing. _Meeting_ the people who'd been involved...

"I'm sorry we won't meet Mr. Still," Jiya managed.

"Perhaps you'll come back," Letitia said.

Jiya gave her a polite smile. "Perhaps."

They said their goodbyes, and took with them everything of potential interest Wyatt had found on the three dead Rittengoons as well as the modern guns. They swept the area and didn't see any sign of Emma. "She's either back in the present, or at the courthouse," Jiya guessed.

"The Lifeboat's close enough. Let's go find out."

#

Jiya and Wyatt had beaten them back to the Lifeboat. "The Stills?" Lucy asked.

"Safe, and they're moving the records," Wyatt said. "No thanks to Emma."

"She was there? Good."

Wyatt and Jiya both looked at her like she'd grown a second head, and it was a hideous bug head. " _Good?_ "

"We never saw her at the courthouse, and I don't like not knowing what she's up to."

"Fair enough," Wyatt said after a minute.

"Emma's jumped," Jiya told them.

"Great," Lucy sighed. "Let's go home."

"She's not in the present."

Lucy's hands paused on her seatbelt.

"Then where?" Wyatt asked.

"New York City. August 18 th , 1846."

"I don't know," Lucy said, before any of them could ask. "The Mexican-American War broke out about five weeks earlier, but I don't know why Emma would go to New York City for that. Where's the Wikipedia drive?"

As Jiya got the Lifeboat up and running, Lucy turned on the laptop and checked their local copy of Wikipedia. Finally she had to shake her head. "I don't know," she repeated rather bleakly. Emma setting the agenda was more dangerous than Nicholas Keynes had ever been, and she didn't like not knowing.

She looked at Garcia, but he didn't have any answers.

"I found this on one of the dead Rittenhouse agents." Wyatt pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket.

Lucy studied it. "I don't recognize the address."

"Could be a trap," Garcia said.

"It could _always_ be a trap," Wyatt retorted.

"It's a place to start," Lucy said firmly.

An hour later— or nine years earlier, if you wanted to be technical— they were walking down the streets of 19 th -century Manhattan, taking in the sights, the sounds... and the smells. Especially the smells.

"And I thought New York City smelled bad _now_ ," Garcia muttered.

"It does smell bad now." Wyatt was scanning the rooftops and windows. "The address should be right up here."

They turned the corner. Identifying the building wasn't difficult, thanks to the sign. "The New-York Daily Tribune?" Jiya read. "Should I have heard of them?"

"They were one of the most important newspapers in the mid 19 th  century," Lucy told her. "Whatever Emma wants here, it's not good."

Wyatt glanced at her. "Doesn't look like anybody's home." He tried the door. It was locked.

"Today's Tuesday, they should definitely be here."

"We passed an alley. Maybe there's a back door." Wyatt motioned for them to wait, and doubled back.

He stopped at the back corner of the building, and gave them all an irritated look over his shoulder when they were right behind him. Garcia, bringing up the rear, just shrugged.

"Wait here," Wyatt hissed, and peeked around the corner.

He ducked back almost immediately, then leaned around and opened fire. "It's Emma!"

Garcia was suddenly there beside her, pushing her and Jiya back. "Cover me." He waited for Wyatt's nod, then dove and rolled across the alley to take cover behind a parked cart.

Lucy crouched low and stuck her head around the corner, ignoring Wyatt's yells. Emma was sheltering behind a wagon, laying down covering fire for the big man who'd just dumped someone bound and gagged into the back. The big man grabbed the reins— Emma jumped up beside him, then leaned around the side, still shooting—

Wyatt ran into the alley as they drove off, but his remaining shots just hit the side of the wagon. He lowered his gun.

Lucy ran about three steps before realizing none of them were with her. "We have to follow them!"

"You have to not run into fire when I'm trying to protect you!" Wyatt snapped.

"Could we do this later? Emma just kidnapped Horace Greeley!"

"Who's Horace Greeley?" Jiya asked.

"He's the Trib's founder and editor. He uses the paper to advocate for all sorts of progressive causes, and tell people all over the country about the reformers of the day. But even more than that, he shapes our very idea of a modern newspaper. Without him, we're stuck in the era of broadsheets and society gossip. If Emma kills him, it's catastrophic."

"Okay," Wyatt said, with one last pointed look towards her. "Let's go."

They found a carriage. Garcia efficiently removed the protesting driver and swung into his place. Wyatt helped Lucy and Jiya in, then scrambled up beside Garcia and reloaded.

This one was an open carriage. Good for Lucy's claustrophobia _and_ for communication. "Why doesn't Emma just kill Greeley?" Wyatt called over his shoulder.

"I bet she wants to force him to print retractions," Lucy said. "Recant his old ideas. His editorial section was very influential, and it was read across the country. Or maybe she even wants to force him to hand the paper over to Rittenhouse. His staff are loyal, they'd never do that without his say-so."

They careened through the city, Garcia under the impression he was driving something much more maneuverable. "They're heading for the docks," Garcia called.

"We can't let them put him on a ship to God-knows-where."

But they passed the docks devoted to big, ocean-going ships, heading towards the smaller ones. They pulled up just in time to see Emma and her Rittengoon in the back of a small boat, being rowed across the East River. Emma smirked, and gave them a jaunty wave.

Wyatt grabbed his gun. Emma grabbed the bound Horace Greeley, and leaned him against the gunwale with a warning look.

Garcia started negotiating with another captain, but Lucy grabbed his arm. "There's a steamship just down the wharf."

She tried to keep her eyes on the rowboat as they ran down the docks. They paid and piled onto the deck just as the big ferry was about to pull away. Lucy leaned over the railing and stared hard, trying to pick out Emma's red hair against the dark water.

"There." Garcia pointed. "We'll probably beat them there."

"We'll definitely beat them there," Wyatt said on her other side. "Guess they didn't think the ferry would let them check Greeley as freight." He turned to Lucy. "So, _Dr._ Preston, let's talk about the phrase _wait here_. You don't exactly make it easy for me to do my job when you run into Emma's line of fire!"

"And I can't do my job without knowing what's going on! Would you have recognized Greeley?"

"Maybe if Flynn or I had been the first ones through that door, Rufus would still be alive," Wyatt snapped.

Lucy almost got whiplash from the subject change. "Like it would be any better if one of _you_ were dead?"

"Where do we think Emma's taking him?" Jiya broke in. Her face was pinched, and her tone didn't leave much room for disagreement.

"She needs to be able to, uh... to torture him without being interrupted," Lucy said. "So, somewhere without a lot of people around."

"Or somewhere with so many people around that a few extra screams won't be noticed," Garcia pointed out.

Lucy really hoped he wasn't speaking from experience. In any role.

"Shouldn't she have more people?" Lucy asked after a minute. "The Mothership holds six. Garcia shot one in 1855—"

"And we killed three more," Wyatt said. "So. This time we outnumber her. We should be able to get the drop on her for once."

Jiya winced.

Wyatt at frowned at her. "What?"

"Did you... see something?" Lucy asked, hesitant.

"What I've _seen_ is enough genre savvy movies to wonder why you would ever say something like that."

The ferry landed, and they disembarked. The disadvantage to landing before Emma was that she could see where they'd gone, and direct her own boat elsewhere. The captain of that ship tacked well east, and by the time the four of them reached that end of the docks, Emma was forcing Greeley out of the boat. She'd untied and ungagged him; he was leaning on her, ostensibly for support, but Lucy knew her gun was in the small of his back.

"Where's the other guy?" Wyatt asked.

"There they are!"

Lucy turned, and gasped. Coming towards them alarmingly fast was an alarmingly large group of alarmingly agitated people. Coming _straight_ towards them.

"After them!" another voice yelled.

"Traitors!"

"We'll run them out of town!"

Garcia shoved Jiya in front of him and grabbed Lucy's arm. "Come on!"

It felt like they ran forever. In reality it was only two and a half or three miles before Lucy dropped back to a walk. Wyatt forced them to go another quarter mile at a quick walk, until they were well into the country and he was convinced they'd lost their pursuit.

Lucy collapsed onto a fallen log, and focused on the sorely underrated pleasures of breathing. Ever since getting hired as an assistant professor, her runs had gotten farther and farther apart, and since— since this had started, she hadn't had any time for it at all. Running for your life was, of course, very aerobic, but she didn't do that very often, and rarely this _far_. Thank God.

"Well." Jiya sat beside her. It made Lucy feel a little better that the younger woman sounded nearly as out of breath. "I'd never seen a mob with actual _pitchforks_ before."

"Do we even know what they were accusing us of?" Lucy managed to get out.

Jiya shook her head. Wyatt shrugged. Garcia looked a little winded, Wyatt not at all. Ugh. Disgusting.

"We're going to need some help." Lucy straightened up, and tried to rub some of the pain out of her shins. 19 th  century boots were _not_ made for sprinting. "Wyatt? Did you find anything else on the agents you killed?"

"Just a bunch of guns."

"Garcia?"

He glanced back at them. "Same."

"One or two of us could play bait for the mob while the others look for Greeley," Jiya suggested after a minute.

None of them greeted that suggestion with enthusiasm, but it made sense.

"We might be able to sneak back into town undetected," Lucy said. "But we have no idea where to start.

"Where would Emma know where to start?" Garcia asked after a minute. "She's never been here before, right? Either she's done her research finding a place to hold Greeley, or she's winging it and finding something near the docks."

"Or she's found some other Rittenhouse people," Wyatt suggested. "We _know_ they were around now. No reason she wouldn't go to them for reinforcements." He glanced at Garcia. "You find any names from this time and place?"

"The Astors, obviously," Garcia said after a minute. "But most of the big New York families are just getting started. Rittenhouse's seat of power right now is elsewhere."

"Flynn and I can play bait while you two—"

Garcia held up his hand suddenly, and started up the low hill behind them. Wyatt stopped talking, and got between Jiya and Lucy, and Garcia, gun in hand.

Garcia crept closer to the top, listening to something. Now Lucy could here it, too— splashing, and someone whistling.

Garcia looked over the top of the rise, and then relaxed. Wyatt scrambled up the hill beside him. His eyebrows went up.

Lucy and Jiya joined them. Over the hill was a pleasant little creek that pooled before tumbling down the slope. Above the water, a man's head and shoulders were just visible.

Then he climbed out, and turned to grab something—

"So he's, uh, very naked," Jiya observed.

"Is this the initial meeting of the Brooklyn Naturists or something?" Wyatt muttered.

Jiya gave Lucy a strange look. "Something you want to share with the class, or should we just... not... ask?"

Lucy realized she was smiling. "No, I know who that is now. And I think he might even be able to help us."

"Oh," Jiya said. "Great. ... wait. ' _Now_?'"

#

"One of the best things in the world, swimming," Walt Whitman said, in his hearty, resonant voice as he tended the little campfire. "Toughens the skin, you know. One of the great inlets of disease." He looked up at Flynn and Wyatt. "I can't recommend it enough for gentlemen. Crucial for a manly soundness. Of course, I am sorry I took you ladies by surprise."

"Don't mention it," Jiya said, sipping her coffee. "Again. Really."

Lucy hid her smile behind her own coffee cup. Walt was, apparently, spending a few days out in the Brooklyn countryside to 'rejuvenate' himself and 'enjoy the Adamic air-baths,' into which euphemism she was not going to inquire. "Mr. Whitman, it's so lucky we met you. We're in Brooklyn about one of your colleagues."

"Colleague? Hmm?"

"Mr. Horace Greeley, at the New-York Daily Tribune?"

"Hmm," Walt said.

"Of course, it doesn't have the same _local_ touch as your Brooklyn Eagle, but... I know Mr. Emerson, for one, admires him." She watched the effect of that, Whitman himself having been a great admirer of Emerson.

Being a great admirer of Emerson? Time travel really messed with her grammar.

"No, Greeley's a good man," Walt admitted. "What do you want with him?"

"He's been kidnapped," Wyatt said.

" _Kidnapped_?" The bushy eyebrows shot up towards his hair.

"Yes, and we're afraid his kidnappers are going to— hurt him very badly."

"But why?" Whitman sounded completely confused, this man who'd written of the whole country's teeming masses with as much benevolent enthusiasm as myopic condescension.

"Because Mr. Greeley upsets people with his paper," Lucy told him. "Powerful ones, who don't like how he advocates for everyday Americans."

"Ahhh," Walt said slowly. "Scoundrels."

"We were trying to help him," Wyatt said, "but we were run out of town by an angry mob."

"An angry mob?" Walt's journalist ears seemed to perk up.

"And we're afraid we won't get back to him in time before— well, in time," Lucy said. She looked up at him. "I don't suppose you could help us?"

Whitman was quiet for a long moment. "He's popular out here, with the country folk, Mr. Greeley is," he said abruptly. "Good sorts of people. Vital blood of the country. Yes, I think I can find some people to help you."

"Oh good."

"The farmers will all be in their fields right now, but give it a few hours and I think I can persuade some of them. In the mean time, perhaps you'd like to join me in another bath?" He beamed at Wyatt and Garcia.

"... no thanks," Wyatt said.

"You know, he— or she— who has never known the exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in nature, has never really known what health is."

Wyatt made a polite but deeply non-committal noise, and hid his face in his own mug.

Lucy took pity on him. "I'm afraid my husband can't swim, Mr. Whitman."

Wyatt shot her a look of fervent gratitude.

"I can teach you. There's nothing indecent about it—"

"Uh, no, I need him to... help me with something... over there. Back where we left our stuff." She gave Walt a bright smile and tugged Wyatt to his feet, then off into the woods.

"Oh my God," Wyatt muttered, when they came to a stop out of sight of the little campsite. "Walt Whitman, radical nudist. I didn't pay a lot of attention in school, but I'm pretty sure I would've noticed _that_ in my history book."

"The history books leave out a _lot_ about him. I'm pretty sure mine described his poetry as 'earthy.'"

"Yeah? How would you describe it?"

"Let's just say, ever since I did some extra-curricular reading after we covered him in tenth grade literature class, the phrase 'phallic thumb of love' has been seared into my brain."

"... yeah, I really needed to know that," he muttered.

His turn to get a bright smile. "I'm going to go back. Garcia can take care of himself, and Whitman would never dream of deliberately making Jiya uncomfortable— or Garcia either, for that matter, but, uh—"

"— but Whitman has all the subtlety of a golden retriever puppy," Wyatt finished. "I'll, uh, keep watch out here. What? That mob could come back any minute."

Lucy returned to the campfire. "Is your husband a soldier?" Walt asked her abruptly.

"Yes, how did you know?"

"That straight, vital stance. I've seen it before." Walt settled into his chair. "Now," he said. "Tell me all about this angry mob."

#

Wyatt expressed doubt that, in the middle of harvest season, Walt Whitman could gather enough farmers who actually cared about Horace Greeley to matter. Privately, Lucy did, too.

But she should've remembered what he became famous for: his ability to arrange words in a way to stir people's emotions.

"I did not expect this," Wyatt whispered, as they listened to Walt persuade a man to sneak the four of them into town.

"He admired actors deeply," Lucy whispered back. "Later in life he makes a habit of declaiming passages from Shakespeare on ferries and buses. And even though Greeley runs a New York City newspaper, he always had a deep interest in agrarian issues. Farmers knew him. Especially these farmers."

"I don't want anyone getting hurt."

"We don't need them to confront Emma. We just them to get us back into the city. Past whoever that was she sicced on us."

A few more minutes and they set out for Brooklyn. Lucy, Jiya, Wyatt, and Garcia were hidden in the bottom of a farmer's cart, to be let out near one of the docks. Walt and a few other farmers and sons of farmers walked casually alongside, just a normal party from the country heading into the city. This was Lucy's day for uncomfortable rides in wheeled 19 th  century vehicles, apparently.

Had it really all been that day? Had they been in 2017 Florida just that morning?

Lucy could tell from the surrounding noise when they reached the outskirts of the city. "I don't know what your friend told them, but there's definitely some shady characters watching out here," Walt stage-whispered. He sounded excited by the prospect.

"Emma must've paid off some local goons when we shot all of hers," Wyatt muttered.

As the editor of one of the local papers, Walt had a good idea which buildings were standing unused right now, and by the time they reached the docks, had had casual chats with two more acquaintances, met in passing, who had relevant news. Never let it be said Walt Whitman wasn't a people person.

"One of my friends here has a cousin who's a merchant down at the docks," Walt told them in an undertone. "We'll get him to help us search a few of the likely prospects." The cart stopped. "We're here."

They extricated themselves from under the farmer's squash. Garcia swung Lucy down from the edge of the cart. "These people are dangerous," Wyatt was telling Walt firmly. "If you see them, don't try to stop them. Just come get us."

Lucy honestly wasn't sure that was sinking in.

Some commotion ahead distracted her.

"There's a building up there surrounded by some rough-looking men, but the owner is in Europe and he hasn't rented it out." Walt's professional curiosity appeared to be aroused.

"Great," Wyatt said. "Let us—"

"Hello!" A young farmer up ahead called a cheerful greeting as the four of them pressed into the shadow of the nearest building. "Can you tell me the way to the Wyckoff farm?"

Someone made a contemptuous noise. "What's a matter, copper boots? Ain't you ever been to the city before? Be off with you."

Several pairs of footsteps. "Say that again," a new voice demanded.

Wyatt made a resigned face, and then they heard the first punch.

When they snuck around to the back of the building, it was deserted. Wyatt covered Garcia while he tried the back door: unlocked. He eased it open a crack, and grimaced. "Definitely Emma," he whispered.

"Flynn and I will sneak in and—"

Garcia held up a hand. "She's sending the goon out front to check. We won't get another chance."

They dove in through the back door. Gunshots erupted almost immediately. Lucy and Jiya retreated one building down. 19 th  century construction wouldn't stop modern bullets.

Indistinct yelling—

The back door opened. Garcia backed out, a battered-looking Greeley slung over his shoulder. Lucy ran forward to help him. Wyatt nearly collided with her as he ran out of the building.

"Emma's gone out the front. I don't see her guy. Lucy, Jiya, you two get Greeley to safety. Flynn—"

"JIYA!"

Garcia and Wyatt whirled at Lucy's warning as the Rittengoon lunged out of the shadows towards Jiya, knife in hand. Even if they shot him, his momentum—

Garcia slammed bodily into him. Lucy saw Garcia flinch as the knife bit into his side. She shoved the still-stunned Greeley towards the wall and bolted forward—

_Oh, God, don't make me lose another one._

Garcia shoved the goon off of him and shot him.

"Garcia!"

He pressed his hand to his side, and winced. "I'm fine. It's not deep."

"I didn't ask you to do that!" Jiya spat.

Startled, Lucy turned. Garcia had a similar look on his face.

" _No one else_ is dying for me," Jiya added, in a tone close to a growl.

Garcia's expression eased into understanding. "You're our only pilot, Jiya," he said. "I'd rather a knife to my ribs then be stranded here."

Jiya stared up at him, face taut and angry. Garcia stared down. She blinked first.

"Let's get out of here," she muttered.

By the time they reached the front of the building, Emma's local reinforcements had dissipated and Emma was long gone. "Fled toward the docks," Walt told them.

None of the farmers had taken anything worse than a strong punch, thank God. Walt frowned at Garcia. "Let me call a doctor."

"No," Garcia said hastily. "I'm fine."

"Mr. Whitman, we have to— go, now," Lucy said. "Mr. Greeley here is very shook up. Can you see that he gets the care he needs?"

"Of course. Of course. Leave it to me." He tugged Mr. Greeley's arm across his shoulders and bodily supported the taller man.

"We don't think she'll be back, but just in case—"

"I'll take him to a farmer friend of mine for a few days," Walt promised. "Keep him out of sight. Come on, Mr. Greeley. Let's get you to safety, hmm? Maybe later we can talk about your latest editorial." One of the farmers hurried forward to help the editor into the cart, and the party set off for the edge of the city.

Lucy, Wyatt, Jiya, and Garcia headed for the docks. By the time they got there, Emma was gone, but a young boy claimed to have seen her board the last steamship.

Lucy watched Garcia, worriedly, as they waited for the next one. He looked down, and saw her watching. His expression softened a bit. "Don't worry," he said, so only she could hear. "I'm durable."

Alert for another attack, they crossed to the other side without incident and boarded a carriage in the direction of the Lifeboat. Lucy smothered a yawn. It had been an interminable day.

Garcia winced at the jolting of the carriage, but walked the last quarter mile steadily enough. Lucy yawned again as she strapped herself in—

"Guys," Jiya said tightly. "Emma's in 1850. Maine."

They looked at each other blankly.

Jiya powered up the Lifeboat. "And we can't follow her."

"What? Why not?" Had any of them been to 1850 already? Lucy didn't think so—

"Because we only have enough power for one more jump."

Wyatt looked sidelong at Flynn, but decided not to say whatever it was he'd been about to say. Not that it was hard to guess.

"We'll have to go back to Florida, charge, and... hope she can't wreak havoc before we can catch up to her," Jiya said grimly.

"But if we—"

"It's this or get stuck in 1850," Jiya snapped. "And I've had enough of that for one lifetime."

"It's four hours, right?" Wyatt said. "We can patch Flynn up and try to figure out what she's doing before we get there, so we don't have to wing it."

"I'm fine," Garcia muttered.

"What if this is her plan?" Lucy asked. "Have us chase her across two jumps so we can't follow her on the third?"

"It _doesn't matter_ ," Jiya bit out. "We can't do anything about it! For God's sake, can't you all _for once_ just listen to me?"

In the not-speaking that followed, the accelerating drive trains sounded particularly loud.

#

Connor's pleased smile disappeared when Jiya told him that Emma was still in the past. "We had to come back to charge." She brushed past them all. "Four hours."

"You don't necessarily have to wait the full four hours," Connor pointed out. "She'll be charged enough for a round trip in less time than that."

Jiya stopped at the bottom of the ladder. "And what if Emma plans to just keep jumping through history, back to back to back? We'll need all the juice we can get."

Connor watched her ascend the ladder, frowning.

"Garcia got in between her and a knife," Lucy told him quietly, when the trap door was closed. "I think she took it personally."

Connor's worried confusion resolved into worried understanding.

"Speaking of." Wyatt had grabbed their first aid kit. "Flynn, sit down and take your shirt off."

"This is so sudden, Wyatt."

Wyatt glared.

"Here." Connor dug in a pile of boxes and pulled out a cot. "Your feet will hang off the end, but it's better than nothing. And don't tell Jiya that's down here."

No, she didn't need any encouragement to push herself unhealthily and stay down here, working, at all hours, did she.

"Lucy? Hard drive?"

Lucy retrieved the hard drive for Connor and let him work his magic as she struggled out of her bodice. She knew she should take advantage of the opportunity to rest, but so soon after the mission, with Emma still out there, she was too keyed up.

"It's _fine_ ," Garcia was saying. "It barely broke the surface."

"Yeah? Remember what happened _last_ time you let someone get knifed on one of these trips?"

Lucy opened her mouth, because that wasn't fair—

"This is touching, Wyatt, I didn't know you cared," Garcia managed, easing gingerly out of his coat.

"I don't give a damn about you," Wyatt retorted. "But you can help people I do care about."

The two men stared at each other. Garcia gave in with bad grace, struggled out of his waistcoat, and lay on the cot.

"Well?" she prompted Connor. "Please tell me Horace Greeley recovered and kept writing editorials."

"What?" Connor looked up from his screen. "Oh. Um, yes. According to this, his timeline changed very little." He continued reading.

"And William Still was still acquitted? Still published _The_ _Underground Railroad Records_ in 1872?"

"Yes, yes, all that's fine..."

Lucy gave up and let him do whatever was so engrossing him.

"Hold _still_ ," Wyatt was snapping to Garcia.

"Sorry, I do intend to keep breathing."

She picked up a tablet and sat down near the cot, carefully facing away. "So far, so good," she told them. "It sounds like we kept much from changing on those two trips."

"Another victory for the status quo," Garcia muttered.

She turned and looked at him, happened to glance down, felt a little light-headed, and turned quickly away. "What you suggested after 1880," she managed. "Finding our own pressure points in history. You still think that's a good..." She gave up and rested her head against her knees. "... idea?"

"You had to go and look, huh," Wyatt sighed.

"I'll be fine." Her voice came out muffled. "... Garcia?" She reached over her shoulder, fumbled, and rather clumsily put her hand in his hair.

"Sorry, Lucy," he said carefully. "You don't inherit... sole ownership of the bedroom just yet."

" _Stop_ ," Wyatt said. " _Talking_."

"We played defense for so long," Lucy said after a minute. "First against Garcia, then Emma. What if we... stopped?" After two back-to-back missions, with the immediate prospect of a third, she just wanted this to _end_ . She understood Garcia's frustration in 1780, and his bone-deep weariness after that. Why couldn't they _stop_ her?

"What if Emma goes back in time to change something after we've already been there?" Wyatt asked. "Playing defense, at least we always bat last."

"I thought you didn't like sitting around with nothing to do."

"We're not."

"It's a good idea," Garcia managed.

"Do I have to _gag_ you?" Wyatt demanded.

"Buy me dinner first."

Lucy wasn't going to look again, but she hid a smile at the outraged silence that followed.

"Of course _you_ think it's a good idea, Mr. Dynamite History and See What Happens." Wyatt apparently gave up.

"That's right, Master Sergeant Let's Sit On Our Asses and See What That Accomplishes."

 _Oh my God_ . "Garcia," Lucy said. _How exactly did you survive to adulthood, again?_

She thought she heard him sigh. But at least he shut up.

"This is interesting," Connor said. "This timeline has two more poems by Walt Whitman than your old timeline."

Glad for the distraction, Lucy asked, "Really?"

"'A market-place fray' and 'To a soldier.'"

It didn't take her long to find them. "Huh. 'I, coming home through the secret dusk, sing of a soldier. I tell you, I sing a soldier straight and proud, lithe and lathéd, of not such a great size, no, nor a small one neither, but bronzed and sinewed, electric and rosy—'"

She scanned to the next lines and stopped abruptly, eyebrows flying up. Did she really want to read this out loud to Wyatt and Garcia? No, she did not.

"Actually, I, uh... I really should be finding Emma's target," she muttered.

#

Two and a half days later, she stumbled through the rain and the mud, mostly supported by Garcia's sturdy arm. She'd torn a long gash down her shoulder and back getting out of the lighthouse, and it throbbed fiercely. The rest of her ached from exertion, and her head and stomach spun from exhaustion. She hadn't slept since her catnap after 1846.

The nor'easter blew another spat of rain in their faces. Garcia's arm tightened as the accompanying wind made her stagger. "Almost there," he told her.

She nodded. She could see it. Up ahead, Wyatt and Jiya were staggering through the storm, and ahead of _them_ was the dark bulk of the Lifeboat.

And they'd won.

She'd tended and defended that lighthouse as best she could, for a day and a half. When Emma's goons had finally forced her out of it, one woman overwhelmed by sheer numbers, she'd set the whole damn thing on fire.

She didn't think this particular lighthouse had been destined to be destroyed in this storm. But she _knew_ the _Ocean_ was meant to have battered her way through the waves and up the Kennebec to Bath. The blazing beacon she'd set on the headland had let the captain bring the ship and its passengers safely through the storm, against the odds and Rittenhouse besides. The Stowes were safe.

They'd _won_.

She stumbled to a stop and let Garcia lift her towards the Lifeboat. Wyatt pulled her over the edge and towards her seat as Garcia climbed in behind her and shut the hatch. Jiya had already gotten out of her wet upper garments so she didn't drip on the console. Her hoodie made quite a contrast to her sodden skirts.

Wait, no. That was Rufus's hoodie, wasn't it.

Lucy felt like smiling and tearing up and hugging Jiya all at the same time, but she was too tired to move. Wyatt brushed her wounded shoulder; she gasped and flinched away.

"I want to look at that before we go," Garcia said behind her. "May I?"

Lucy nodded. She heard him get the first aid kit out, then felt him efficiently slice open the back of her bodice.

"Can't it wait until—" Wyatt leaned forward to look, and stopped talking.

Lucy's stomach dropped. "How bad?" She tried to crane her neck to see.

Wyatt put his hand on the side of her face and forced her to look at him. "Nope. Don't want you fainting."

Lucy was _exhausted_ , but this struck her as unreasonable. "I'm not going to _faint_ ," she snapped. "If I can deal with having parts of my internal organs sloughing off every month, I can damn well—"

"Whoa, there, Ms. Steinem." Wyatt grabbed a bottle from Garcia, over her shoulder. He shook some of the tablets into her palm as she fumed at him, then passed her the water bottle Jiya was holding out. "You _told_ us you faint in 1865, after he shot me. Remember? And back at the house, you looked pretty green when I was patching him up."

"I'm going to disinfect this," Garcia warned her. At least that would be better than a fever of 105, ri—

" _Shit!_ " Fire blossomed across her shoulder. She smelled rubbing alcohol. She hissed, and tensed, and tried to wriggle some other part of her.

"And I grazed you," Garcia added.

"'Grazed' implies a near miss." Jiya flipped the overhead switches. "I know Rufus woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares about hordes of soldiers, all needing bullets removed."

They were quiet for a moment.

"You're alive," Garcia pointed out. "Therefore, I grazed you. Lucy, I want to stitch the deepest part of this before we jump."

" _Um_ —" She flinched away.

His hands stilled. "You prefer to wait for Agent Christopher? She might not be there."

"I just, uh, this is the nineteenth century, and your hands are probably covered in— you know, sanitary standards of the times weren't— We don't have any soap, and I think it would be safer to—"

He dangled a pair of gloves in front of her face.

" _Fuck_ ," she muttered.

"Valiant effort." Garcia sounded amused.

She turned to look at him, and winced at the fresh pain. "How bad?"

"I think you'll be fine. But you're not gonna do yourself any favors bouncing around a jump with that thing open."

She swallowed, and nodded. She turned back in her seat, and tried not to shake.

She tried to ignore Mom's voice saying, _Be a little braver, dear. Where's your backbone?_

"We're good to go as soon as the pulse starter warms up," Jiya said. "I'll, uh, wait 'til you're all out of surgery, there."

Lucy felt her breathing speed up. God, how embarrassing. She just— she really didn't need them to know what a wimp she was.

"Hey." Wyatt made her look at him. "Hey, it's okay. Just breathe, Lucy."

"I bet other me never faints at the sight of blood," she muttered.

"Yeah, well. Other you also hangs out with a version of me who looks like he has a weasel on his face."

Lucy snorted. Wyatt gave her a little shrug and a little smile. "C'mon," he added. "Breathe with me." He took a slow, deliberate breath in, then exhaled. Lucy knew exactly what he was doing and resented it, but she matched her breathing to his anyway. It helped—

"Keep doing that," was her only warning before a pain much worse than the alcohol pierced her shoulder. She bit back a shout.

"Wyatt, keep her still," Garcia added as Lucy whimpered.

"I'm right here," Lucy pointed out through clenched teeth as Wyatt put a firm hand on her shoulder. Her stomach roiled. She felt lightheaded. "Not— an object."

"Trust me," Garcia muttered, "this is a _lot_ easier if I pretend you're not a person with nerve endings."

... oh. She thought about the implications of that. She thought about Garcia coming to the point of showing them his discomforts and vulnerabilities. That distracted her until he _stabbed_ her again. She bit her tongue hard and tried not to whimper.

"Hey." Wyatt took her hand with his free one. "You're not a soldier, Lucy. No one expects you to be brave about this."

His eyes, his voice, suggested a sincerity that made Lucy feel not quite so bad when a choked sob forced its way out of her mouth. She squeezed his hand, hard.

"That's it," he told her. "You're doing great. Don't worry. You can't hurt me."

Garcia snorted. Wyatt's mouth tightened, but he didn't take his eyes off her.

"Hey, professor," Wyatt said. "You said you thought you knew why Emma went after Harriet _this_ way. Bringing down an entire ship seems like a lot of trouble for one author."

Lucy tried to recollect her thoughts. "She's not just— _an_ author," Lucy said through clenched teeth. "Lincoln supposedly— called her 'the— little woman who—" She took a deep breath. "Wrote the— book that— started this great war.' _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ supposedly— inspires a lot of— the abolitionist movement."

"It also starts some of the most enduring stereotypes about black people," Jiya said. "Just saying."

Pause. "Look, _I'm_ just saying, why didn't Emma just _shoot_ her?"

"Her— family." She squeezed Wyatt's hand tighter. "The— Beechers. 19 th  century progressive powerhouse. Henry's a— famous abolitionist. Isabella? Women's suffrage leader. Other siblings— also abolitionists." Lucy swallowed a moan. "She's traveling with her kids and her aunt. Maybe Emma thought— if they all died, the family would've been devastated."

"... huh," Wyatt said.

"But she—" Lucy bit her lip. "Doesn't know them very well. Wouldn't have— stopped them. You know— Harriet— basically kicked Thoreau's and Emerson's ass?"

"... is this some weird nineteenth century cage fighting?"

"No, _metaphorically_. They believed in self-improvement. That people could— be a lot better than they were, and that reformers could make the world a better place by bringing out the best in people."

"Okay, I'll take your word for it."

"But the Transcendentalists never really _do_ anything. They can't point to one significant social reform that they achieved. But Harriet Beecher Stowe— she writes. And people argue about how much _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ really meant to the war, but of any book this century? Only the Bible sells more copies."

"Um—"

"And then— _and then_ — when people were questioning whether the book was realistic? Calling it the nineteenth-century equivalent of fake news? She writes _another_ book where she cites all her sources." Lucy frowned. "Wait, are you done?"

"I've been done." Garcia sounded amused. He had one huge hand on the front of her shoulder, and was applying pressure with the other. "You, uh... did good."

Wyatt handed Lucy a tissue. She discovered her face was wet. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "Sorry," she muttered. "I just... I don't like needles."

"For God's sake, Lucy," Garcia said, "don't apologize."

"Oh. You're right. I— Sorry."

She could only hear his noise of exasperation, but whatever face he made, Wyatt laughed.

Garcia let go a moment later. She tried to look. This time it was Garcia who caught her head. "I'll show you in the mirror at the house if you really want." He slid his hand down to rest against her neck. "Relax so I can bandage it."

"O... okay." She let her shoulders drop.

"Lucy. Relax."

"I am."

"No, you're _not_."

"Picture Idris Elba waiting for you in a hot tub," Jiya said over her shoulder.

"Ah, there we go. Thank you, Jiya."

Lucy felt her face burn. "I hate you all."

She gritted her teeth as Garcia applied ointment and gauze, then secured it all with a dressing. "Jiya, that blanket."

Jiya handed it to him. He folded it and tucked it behind her shoulder. "Lean back."

She did, and winced.

"One uncomfortable ride home, and then there's topical anesthetic." By the sound of it, he was gathering up the wrappers and stripping off his gloves. Wyatt leaned forward to do up her restraints.

The rough ride jolted her in every possible direction. Her shoulder ached sickeningly. When the Lifeboat came to a stop, she swallowed a groan.

Wyatt looked at her with apprehension and scrambled to get the door open. Jiya, bless her, had landed outside the house, so Lucy didn't have to navigate the ladder. Garcia helped her stand, then swung her to the ground.

Denise came running to meet them, Connor on her heels. They had the first aid kit, having correctly guessed why the Lifeboat hadn't returned to the Batcave. "What do you need?" Denise asked.

Lucy stopped when Garcia did, and leaned against him.

"She's stitched up, but I promised her anesthetic."

Denise carefully pushed her ruined bodice out of the way, and made a sympathetic noise. "I'll do it."

But Garcia stayed, too, with a comforting rock-like solidity.

"Will she be all right?" Connor's voice.

"It doesn't look dangerous." Denise's calm voice reassured Lucy. "I bet it hurts like hell, though."

Even if Denise had been alarmed, Lucy didn't have much energy left for panic. Or for anything. She was just too _tired_.

Denise finished up. Garcia nudged Lucy gently into motion. Lucy had no idea where Wyatt and Jiya had gone— for all she knew, they were right outside the limits of her tunnel vision.

"Garcia," she muttered as they entered the house.

"Hmm?"

"All I want is eight hours of sleep." Her words were starting to slur. "I don't care how you make that happen. Non-lethally."

She looked up. His eyes lit up, somewhat disturbingly. "Eight hours," he promised her, steering her towards their bedroom. "Take the bed." He opened the door for her.

"I'm filthy."

"I don't care."

Once he closed the door behind her, she peeled out of her wet clothes. She stretched out on the bed, avoiding her wounded side. She didn't need to be coddled, but just this...

#

Garcia was tired enough that he hadn't thought to grab his clothes before Lucy went to bed. As long as he had to go in there, he might as well take her some water for when she woke. He knew he could get in and out without disturbing her; she was exhausted. Of the four of them, only she had manned a lighthouse alone, and then she'd had to have part of that long, jagged wound stitched without anesthetic. For him, or for Wyatt, that wouldn't've have been a big deal. But Lucy was— well, she'd _been_ a civilian, at any rate. And while the hardened future Lucy who'd popped out of that Lifeboat would probably be a stronger ally in combat, Garcia was reluctant to see this Lucy change into that one.

It had been the other way around, once. He'd been impatient with this softer Lucy. He'd even wondered how this woman could ever transform into the one who'd visited him in São Paulo. But he'd quickly started seeing flashes of her steel: not displacing her fear and anxiety, but showing _through_ them.

Future Lucy had warned him that he and Lucy would start out on different sides, but— she hadn't prepared him for the reality of it. She couldn't have, when it had differed so markedly from her own reality. He'd felt a mix of frustration, despair, and... other, harder to define things.

And now, damn it, he knew and liked this Lucy, and he didn't want to lose her.

He quietly closed the door behind him and grabbed what he needed from the dresser, focusing fixedly on what was in front of him. He certainly wasn't going to look _again_ to be sure, but from one glimpse of her exposed shoulder blades, he was pretty sure Lucy hadn't bothered with pajamas. Not surprising, with a cut like that. So he was just gonna grab his stuff, grab those wet clothes off the floor, take the cot, and get the hell out of here. And if that one accidental glance had seared itself into his brain, that was his problem, not hers.

He peeled out of his damp and uncomfortable 19 th  century clothes and showered quickly. His own much less serious cut was healing nicely. He could probably go without a bandage this time.

When he was done, he set the cot directly in front of their bedroom door, to keep his promise of protecting her rest, and stretched out on it. Accidentally seeing a little bare flesh because Lucy was out cold from exhaustion and in too much pain to dress wasn't particularly sexy. But it did remind him of— other Lucy-related times.

The few flickers of arousal he'd felt at the sight of an attractive woman, since Lorena's death, had caused him enough guilt. But those had been detached, as if his body might respond but his heart could never be touched.

None of that was anything like what he felt for Lucy.

If she asked... could he hold anything back? Heart, body, soul, if he still had one of those left... all were involved.

And yet, she deserved so much more than his broken pain, his uncertainty. She deserved _everything_ , not a killer unable to move on from the past.

He was exhausted, too. He knew he wouldn't solve any of this by turning it over in his mind just now. He turned on his good side, and fell asleep.

#

He woke a while later, folded the cot, carried a chair in front of the door, and cracked open a meaty book with _L. Preston_ written on the flyleaf.

Eventually, Agent Christopher approached. "Where's Lucy?"

"Sleeping."

"I need to talk to her. Sooner than later."

He put the book down. "She asked for eight hours of sleep." He kept his voice low. "When does she ever ask for anything for herself?"

"Fair enough," Agent Christopher said after a minute.

The next person to wander by was Wyatt. He frowned. "What're you doing?"

Garcia read to the end of the page, licked his finger, and turned the page. "Lucy doesn't want to be disturbed."

Wyatt raised his eyebrows. "And you do what Lucy wants now, is that it?"

"It was a simple enough request."

The other soldier folded his arms across his chest and stared at Garcia as Garcia read another page. "You did a good job stitching her up today," he admitted. "I'm not sure I could have been that detached."

Garcia was confident Wyatt would've come through if he had to, which meant this was likely a not-so-subtle insult. He just ignored that.

Jiya came by next, but all she did was give Garcia a strange look. He appreciated her restraint.

Another hour and Jiya, Wyatt, and Agent Christopher gathered in the small living room. They'd given her the bare outline of the jumps before they'd all collapsed, but with a triple mission, there were a lot of details to fill in.

Wyatt looked over. "Feel free to chime in any time, Flynn."

Garcia looked up. "I'm sorry, are you saying you want to hear _more_ from me?"

"Who we really need to talk to is Lucy," Agent Christopher cut in. "She's our historian. And she's the only person who can tell us what happened at that lighthouse."

"It can wait."

"Flynn." Agent Christopher tried to stare him down.

He put the book down. "Lucy said, and I quote, 'All I want is eight hours of sleep. I don't care how you make that happen. Non-lethally.'" His smile was probably a little disturbing. That was a plus.

Wyatt joined in the stare-a-thon, but neither of them were particularly daunting. Garcia's only concern was, if they really did try to forcefully move him, could he keep them away from the door quietly enough to let Lucy sleep.

"Guys," Jiya said. "If Lucy's out of it enough to say _that_ to him, do we... _want_ her making decisions?"

Agent Christopher and Wyatt looked at her, then at each other. Then Agent Christopher said, "Flynn, when is Lucy's eight hours up?"

Garcia consulted his watch. "One hour and... fifty-three minutes."

"Fine," Agent Christopher said. "One hour and fifty-three minutes."

 

#

She woke disoriented and aching.

Right. Shoulder wound.

She felt really tired, and at the same time, better. Because 'really tired' was still an improvement on before.

She also really needed the bathroom.

She took some painkillers, and gingerly got up. She shrugged into her robe, wincing at the feel of the cloth against her shoulder. Then she found some normal clothes and opened the door. She hadn't heard a sound—

She nearly fell over Garcia's chair. His whole expression warmed when he turned and saw her, with that smile that reached his eyes. "You still have half an hour," he greeted her. "Shall I keep the Huns at bay so you can power nap?"

She both resented and appreciated his making her laugh. "No." She glanced beyond him to the 'Huns'— Wyatt, Denise, and Jiya were all waiting in the living room.

He dragged his chair out of the way.

"Okay," Denise said. "Now that you're up—"

"Shower." Lucy shuffled in that direction. _No one_ was coming between her and the bathroom, and once she was in there, she might as well clean up.

"We've been waiting—"

" _Shower_." Lucy had no idea where that hint of a growl had come from. Was this how Dr. Jekyll felt?

After a minute, Denise raised her hands. "Okay. You shower. We'll be ready when you're done."

She used the toilet and got herself in the shower. She even remembered to take her robe off first. Shoulder aching, she awkwardly scrubbed the 19 th  century grime off her skin and out of her hair.

Someone knocked on the door. " _I'm still in here_ ," Lucy said.

"It's Jiya. I brought you some bandages. Can I come in and help?"

"... oh. Sure."

The door opened and closed. "I also brought your towel."

Gratefully, Lucy shut the water off and stuck her arm out for that. "Thanks."

"And your toothbrush is on the sink."

"You are a saint." She wrapped herself up and stepped out.

Jiya made a non-committal noise. "Let's see what you say after I've checked you out."

Lucy combed her hair one-handed and tried not to wince at Jiya's gentle fingers. Finally Jiya said, "Feels a little warm, but I think you're going to skip the trip to the top of the mercury this time. How do you feel?"

"A lot better now then when we got back. Thanks, Jiya."

Jiya gave her a small smile, and let herself out so she could get dressed. There was no way Lucy would be wearing a bra for a day or so, so she put her robe back on over her clothes, and emerged in a cloud of steam. She found the others in the kitchen.

"Ah, Rip Van Winkle," Denise greeted her. Lucy opened her mouth, but Denise pointed her to the table, which held a single plate and a glass of iced tea.

Lucy realized she was _starving_.

She inhaled half the plate without a single thought to the past or future. Then she slowed, drank most of the tea, and looked up. She felt, finally, human.

"There you are," Denise said with a faint smile. "Now, tell me what happened at the lighthouse."

#

Lucy wandered out into the muggy Florida evening, and sat on the front step.

Wyatt was sitting in the rickety old swing beneath the oak tree, with a sweating bottle of beer. He looked at her. "How're you feeling?"

"Mmm." She was still tired. Her shoulder still ached. But... but better.

She nudged the sandy dirt with her toes, avoiding the tiny cactus lurking beneath the scraggly grass. "Sorry, did you... come out for some space?"

"You're fine." He hesitated. "I'd ask you to join me, but, uh..."

"But you're sitting in a wooden swing and I just got my shoulder sliced open."

"Mmm." He glanced down at her clothes, but didn't comment. Good. Lucy was not at all in the mood to explain to him why she'd borrowed a shirt from Garcia. She couldn't keep wearing her robe everywhere, she still couldn't wear a bra, and this was baggy enough that she didn't feel self-conscious.

Wyatt rocked gently, the swing creaking. He looked thoughtful.

"What is it?"

He shook his head. "Something's bothering me about the guys me and Jiya fought."

She had to think through all the parts of their latest mission. "In Philadelphia?"

He nodded.

"Do you know what?"

He sighed. "No."

They sat quietly for a while. Lucy turned and leaned her uninjured side against the front door. Despite the ambient temperature, the residual heat from the door felt good.

"So," she said eventually. "Walt Whitman wrote you a poem."

Wyatt made a wry, _this is all crazy_ , kind of face. "That he did."

"It was, uh..." Lucy tried to think of an appropriate adjective, and just ended up shaking her head.

"Hey, at a distance of a hundred and seventy years, I can be flattered."

Lucy snickered. "It was very... vivid. Vivid is the word I would use."

"Okay, stop," Wyatt muttered. The pink on his face might've been more than sunburn.

Her giggle turned to outright laughter, and that felt good. She leaned against the door again.

"... Lucy?"

"Mmm."

"The mosquitoes are going to get bad in a minute."

"Sun's still up," she muttered.

"Lucy."

She opened her eyes. It was dusk, and something was definitely whining around her head.

She swatted at it. Wyatt hesitated, and offered her a hand up. She hesitated, and let him help her to her feet.

"I didn't do anything all day, I don't know why I'm so tired," she muttered.

"Hey, you're healing," he said. "That takes time. And energy."

"Yeah," she sighed, and followed him inside.

#

Lucy woke to low, broken noises from the other side of the room.

He'd seen, _done_ , plenty to give him nightmares. He had them regularly, if the number of times she woke up in the middle of the night to find him staring hollowly into space was any indication. For this one to be bad enough for him to lose control and make noise...

She pushed back her covers. "Garcia."

He groaned, then muttered something she didn't understand.

She crossed the room. "Garcia."

Lucy braced herself, and shook his shoulder firmly. "Flynn!"

He grabbed her arm and yanked her forward like he was preparing to flip her. She dug in her heels. He snorted and gasped. His eyes flew open. He let go of her immediately. She overbalanced and nearly fell on her butt.

"Lucy," he breathed. He sat up. "You all right?"

She nodded, and turned on the light. "You just— you sounded like you were having a _really_ bad nightmare. So I, um. Woke you."

His gaze turned dark and distant. He stared at the floor.

She hesitated, then perched on the bed beside him. "You know— where you are, right?"

He nodded.

She paused. "I considered hitting you in the face with my pillow, but that seemed rude."

He snorted. "Next time pour water on me."

He still looked so horrified. She put her hand on his shoulder. He flinched— she almost let go— and then he leaned into it a little.

"Sorry I woke you," he told her.

"You can stop apologizing."

It was a ghost of a smile she got in response, but she gave him points for effort.

"I, ah..." He rubbed his hand over his face, and looked a little more like his head was actually here, now, in this room, with her. Or at least like he was trying. "That doesn't often happen."

"I know." She gave him a reassuring smile, and hesitantly, slid her hand to the middle of his back. "I didn't even fall on my ass when you let go of me, so I guess all that training's paying off."

He laughed, just one uneven breath. "Good." He took a deep breath, then another.

It was so _strange_ to watch him putting himself together, piece by piece, into the man she usually saw. Only now, when she saw him slowly managing it, did the extent of his earlier vulnerability strike her.

Bit by bit, that coiled tension left him. "Thank you. Lucy."

"Yes." She stayed where she was for another minute, for two. Then she put her arm around his shoulders. Given the difference in their sizes, this perforce put her head against his shoulder.

He looked down at her with a little smile, like this was an adorable human custom she was showing him for his edification. But he didn't pull away. His back was solid under her arm, and warm through the fabric of his t-shirt.

Finally she straightened up. "I'll, uh..."

His breathing caught as she pulled away. Lucy froze.

So did he. He looked startled, but didn't meet her eyes.

"... do you want me to stay?" She _felt_ startled, but that was okay.

"I'm, ah..."

She watched his mouth form the word _fine_ , but no sound actually came out.

"Avoid eye contact once for yes and twice for no," she told him.

He gave a soft _huff_ of laughter.

She got it, she did. It was one thing to hold your... teammate when they'd shattered, to help keep them together through a few particularly dark moments. It was another entirely to show vulnerability yourself.

But knowing even half of what monsters were in his memory, it made perfect sense to her that having a tactile reminder of when and where he was might help him. If he was willing to accept that. She herself, she thought, had sobbed away all her self-consciousness about something like this in that San Francisco alley.

"You know this isn't, ahhhh, anything else," he said finally, not looking at her.

"Of course I know."

Finally, he gave her a soft, resigned look, like when she'd showed up at his door that first night, and gestured to his pillow. She stretched out with her back against the wall.

With one last helpless, amused look, still skewed from the darkness of his nightmare, he turned off the lamp and lay down on his side, in front of her.

Okay, so maybe she was still self-conscious.

It was even more awkward than Lucy had— very well, she _hadn't_ thought this through. His bed was small. He was large. She pressed herself against the wall, because the other option was up against his back. And she felt—

She was an adult. She could name arousal for what it was, even if she'd been denying it— ignoring it— for weeks.

Or months.

She could feel it without wanting to act on it. But it made her self-conscious. It made her re-evaluate every tiny movement. She didn't want to make _him_ uncomfortable.

She reminded herself why she was here. She'd offered him company because he was so shaken by whatever demon had erupted out of his subconscious that she could _tell_ he didn't want to be alone.

Hesitantly, she rested her hand on his waist. He reached up, wrapped his fingers through hers, and moved both their hands down to rest on his thigh.

The last thing she remembered, before she fell asleep with her forehead resting between his shoulder blades, was him whispering, again, "Thank you, Lucy."

#

She woke to a crushing weight of anxiety. Something had gone very, very wrong, and she couldn't—

No, that wasn't panic crushing her. That was _Garcia_.

Sometime in the night he must've rolled backwards. She was wedged against the wall, and he was sprawled half over her. It was a little endearing. He smelled really nice.

It was also _uncomfortable_.

"Garcia!"

He muttered, stirred, and then came awake with a start she could feel along all of her. He rolled forward, off of her, thankfully—

Except her body suddenly felt bereft—

— and propped himself up on one elbow, looking over his shoulder at her. " _Lucy?_ "

"You had a nightmare," she said defensively. "You— you didn't seem to want me to go."

"So you—" He cut himself off there, but she could hear the disbelief in his voice. She felt her face heat. He rubbed his hand over his own face. "I remember now."

He sat up with his feet on the floor, giving herself space to extricate herself from the corner. He was a little pink, too.

"I didn't mean to, ah, smother you," he told her.

It was wholly inappropriate that her instinctive reaction was, _what a wonderful idea_. The feel of his very warm, very solid, very muscular weight pressed all along her body might just be seared into her brain, and—

She shoved that mental image away just as forcefully as it had appeared. "I must have been a gentle and responsive pillow."

As cracks went, it was pretty weak, but he flushed redder, hiding his face in his hand as his shoulders shook. "The least I can do is get you coffee," he said when he felt he could expose his face to the world again.

"Iced tea."

"Right." The bed shifted as he got up.

Lucy sighed, and got up, too. She forced her messy hair into some semblance of order and then stood in front of the fan. Sleeping pressed up against a giant in the heat of a Florida summer in a house without air conditioning was a good way to wake up sweaty and flustered. And if the weather wasn't the only reason she felt a little heated, it was the only one she could do anything about right now.

She heard multiple pairs of footsteps outside the door. "How domestic," Wyatt muttered.

Garcia still had the tail end of a Look on his face when he came inside and handed her the iced tea. "Does it count as keeping my promise to Jiya if I only rolled my eyes at him?"

She didn't say anything. Garcia and Wyatt's mutual lingering dislike, abated though it was, was partially because of... her. And she didn't— she didn't like that, but she wasn't sure any action of hers would fix it.

He seemed to realize he'd brought up a sore subject, and dropped it. She looked at his steaming cup, and shook her head. "I don't understand how you can drink that."

"I can say the same about you."

"Your mother was from Texas, you never had iced tea?"

"I have. I thought it tasted like tree bark then, and it still tastes like tree bark now."

Lucy didn't pursue the subject, mostly because she didn't want to know why he knew what tree bark tasted like.

"I'm, ahhh, sorry about last night," he said after a minute. "I haven't slept with anyone since Lorena died, and I didn't think—" He flushed. "Not in that way. Well, _also_ in that way, but that wasn't the way I meant about—"

He was _really, really red_. Her eyebrows went up.

"... I'll stop talking," he finished.

She let herself savor the adorable delight that was Garcia, flustered, before she said: "It's all right."

He frowned. "How's your shoulder?"

"It's fine." It still ached, but two days of rest had done a lot. She drained her glass. "Do you want the shower first?"

"Take it." He watched her root through her clothes. "Thank you for, ah..."

He touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip as he fumbled finishing that sentence. Lucy was mean enough to let him, and also desperately curious as to how he would describe— _that_.

But, after all, he might blurt out something that would embarrass or horrify one or both of them. "What are, um, teammates and roommates for?" she said, proud of her easy tone of voice until she realized how clunky that sounded. "... or, you know, friends."

His head came up, and he smiled at her, as warm as that first morning she'd woke up in his bed. She felt like she was back in elementary school, where who was friends with whom was a matter of critical importance.

Also, the room suddenly felt very small. She escaped to the shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like my tropes with a side of realism.
> 
> Several historical notes here:
> 
> William, Letitia, Peter, and Charity Still, as well as Jane Johnson and her sons Daniel and Isaiah, were all real people. Barring any mistakes on the part of this non-historian, their story as I’ve repeated it here is true. William really was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and he and Letitia helped and housed hundreds of formerly enslaved people. He really did meet his brother, Peter, for the first time while doing this work, and he really did keep records of all that he did. When it was safe to do so, he published a book based on these records, called _The Underground Railroad Records_ — but the full title gives a slightly better description of its scope: _The Underground Railroad, A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc., Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their efforts for Freedom, As Related By Themselves Or Others, Or Witnessed by the Author; Together With Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers, Of The Road._
> 
> It’s a truly remarkable book, written by a remarkable man. My education on the Underground Railroad didn’t convey the degree to which it was an active resistance network instead of simply a collection of safe houses. I encourage you to check it out.
> 
> Unfortunately, I was able to find out very little else about Letitia, except that she was an active partner in the Railroad. 
> 
> Ann Maria Weems, aka “Joe,” was also a real woman who did indeed escape slavery, hide for six weeks, and make it over the Mason-Dixon line disguised as a coach boy. In real life, however, she came to the Still household on Thanksgiving, 1855. She was helped by a “Dr. H” after she helped her own young cousin escape slavery.
> 
> Dr. H. T. Childs was a Philadelphia abolitionist about whom I know nothing else.
> 
> Sources differ on whether Jane’s testimony was at the trial of William Still, or of Passmore Williamson. I went with the version as represented un the UGRR. Her testimony is also adapted from that account. It was important to me that she speak for herself.
> 
> Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, and James Miller McKim were all Philadelphia abolitionists who were present the day Jane Johnson testified. The Motts actually moved between the year an angry mob or two wanted to storm the house, and the year they helped Mrs. Johnson appear in court and then escape, so it wasn’t the same parlor. But, the larger point stands: Lucretia Mott and her friends once waited patiently in her parlor to receive an angry mob.
> 
> Walt Whitman, his position as the editor of the _Brooklyn Eagle_ , and his enthusiasm for nudity are all real. Some of his dialogue is adapted from either “Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” by “Mose Velsor” (a pen name), or from “A Sun-Bath— Nakedness.” I didn’t want to make him a caricature, but he’s just a very colorful character. Some of his work is genuinely beautiful and profoundly moving. And some of it is full of ill-considered genital euphemisms.
> 
> Horace Greeley is also a real person. The poor man didn’t get any lines, but he talked to the whole country for years through his editorials, so that’s probably okay.
> 
> Harriet Beecher Stowe was also a real person, and she really did travel with her family to Bath, Maine on the ship Ocean on May 25th, 1850. I did, however, invent a convenient lighthouse on the mainland. Credit for the discussion about her goes to my friend C, who is extremely smart, thoughtful, and well-read, and whom I basically paraphrased with her permission. Any inaccuracies are my own.
> 
> This was my first time ever attempting to introduce real people into my work, and I have a bad habit of going down rabbit holes for hours trying to answer questions like “Had ‘thee’ replaced ‘thou’ as the nominative form in plain speech by Lucretia Mott’s time?” (No.) “Would Lucretia and James have had servants?” (Yes.) “What were the Pond Island and Seguin Island lighthouses built out of in 1850?” (Stone.) So this will continue to be primarily a character-driven ensemble work, but there’ll be a few more mission-heavy chapters.


	6. A Hullsome Influence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody Hugs Lucy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note: this chapter contains on-screen violence, blood, and references to suicidal ideation

Lucy never heard the jump alarm any more without wondering if their future selves had returned.

Had that Lucy and Wyatt even made it back to their own present intact? What _kind_ of present had they returned to? If she lived long enough, would she be replaced by that self-assured soldier Lucy who'd stepped out of the Lifeboat?

Lucy had had to admire her. So confident, calm, in charge. But she wasn't sure she wanted to _be_ her. What had she given up, to become who she was?

But did Lucy have any right to balk at giving up anything to get Rufus back and win this war?

She was in the bathroom when the alarm went off, and thought everyone else was already downstairs until she heard quick footsteps above. Wyatt ran downstairs just as she came out.

Right: this was usually the day and time when he disappeared for an hour. She never asked, but she knew he was still talking to that therapist. She was glad. He seemed better— not fixed, but improved. He'd stopped exuding quite so much palpable pain, and he was just... easier to be around. Much easier.

He caught her eye, and if he didn't manage a smile, it was at least a look of camaraderie. "Wonder where Emma's dragging us this time."

"I wish this were over," she blurted. Not something she'd say to Garcia— and not to Jiya, not any more.

He hesitated, reached out, and touched her shoulder. "We'll get through this," he told her firmly.

She smiled weakly, nodded, and followed him downstairs.

This time, only their Lifeboat sat in the Batcave. Which meant that Emma had jumped. They'd had a long enough stretch since that triple mission that Lucy's shoulder had nearly healed, and her stitches were gone.

She'd been glad for the respite. Less glad to fill her time with the beginnings of pilot training.

It was what she had to do for them to beat Rittenhouse and win. She'd told Garcia, in that awful little cell, that she was willing to do whatever it took, so she wouldn't balk at this. She still didn't like it. And she was terrible at it. Connor could say all he wanted that she had just as much potential in this as in any other area, but she wasn't a physicist. It was going to take her far too long to learn this. Why couldn't she be better? Smarter?

"Chicago," Jiya said, when they'd all assembled. "May 7 th , 1892."

Everyone turned to Lucy.

She racked her brains. "Lots of things happened in 1892, but in Chicago?"

She hated this new strategy of Emma's. Going back to obscure historical events... Emma wasn't even a historian, how was she _doing_ this? Had Mom— left detailed notes of other points Rittenhouse could target, or something? Was Lucy failing _again_ to measure up to Mom?

Maybe she was just looking at it the wrong way.

She searched a few databases to be sure Emma wasn't targeting something Lucy remembered differently from a different timeline. "I can't think of a specific historical event. So, maybe there isn't one. Maybe this is the best time for Emma to go after a particular person who's going to matter later. But..." She started to pace the cave.

"She'd need to know where to find them," Denise pointed out.

"Right, so it must be someone well documented."

"So, who matters in Chicago in 1892?" Wyatt asked.

"It's either the beginnings of the Chicago political machine, or Jane Addams and Hull House."

"What's Hull House?"

"One of the earliest and most famous settlement houses in the US."

The others exchanged looks. "Like, a tenement?" Jiya asked.

A pang struck her, out of the blue, of how _Mom_ would have known exactly the significance of this. "No, a cross between a... community center and a government services center, except at that time, there _were_ no government services and it was all provided by charity."

Blank looks. "Why would Rittenhouse care about a community center?" Wyatt asked.

"Jane Addams co-founds it in 1889 with her partner at the time, Ellen Gates Starr. They become leaders in the progressive movement _and_ the anti-war movement. They get labor laws passed— the Workshop and Factories Act will be passed in July of 1893, and it's basically the first child labor law in the country. Unions meet there. Addams wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931! And she changes— Chicago politics, the way people thought about social reform and the government's responsibility to its citizens, the way people thought about women's role in government... She spins a _lot_ of threads that end up in the tapestry of the modern era."

"So... why wait this long to go after them?" Jiya asked. "Why not three years ago?"

Lucy considered this.

"To discredit their ideas with them," Garcia guessed. "Attack the whole movement, not just Jane and her friends. Make sure she doesn't become a martyr."

"Pretty much," Lucy agreed.

"What about the other one you mentioned?" Connor said. "The Chicago political machine."

"It does help elect JFK," she said after a minute, "but if they're gunning for him again, there are easier ways then going back to 1892."

"Okay," Wyatt said. "Then let's go... save Jane Addams and her business partner."

"Partner partner," Lucy corrected him.

He looked taken aback. "Really?"

"What, did you think lesbians hadn't been invented yet?" Denise asked drily.

They all looked at her, a little startled. She avoided eye contact. She'd been a little on edge lately, a little sharp. Lucy didn't know if it was "just" the distance from her family, or... something else.

"No," Wyatt said, with a palpable air of patience, "I just thought they might keep it quiet. Considering it was 1892."

"Wyatt's right, things looked different in that era," Lucy said. "They didn't come out and say it. They wouldn't use the word 'girlfriend.' But... however you want to spin it, Ellen Gates Starr was one of the two great loves of Jane Addams's life."

"Thanks, Professor," Wyatt said, a little drily.

"So, what are we waiting for?" Jiya asked.

"Wait," Connor said. "Take this with you." He picked up a stack of shiny squares of _something_ from the workbench, where it had been slowly growing over the last few days.

"... what is that?" Jiya asked.

"It's a solar charger. I've been working on it with Wyatt. In case you end up jumping past the limits of the battery, unfold this, put it on top of the Lifeboat, and, uh, wait."

"Wait? How long?"

"... depending on the sunlight, two or three weeks for a full charge."

Jiya looked at him.

"But you don't _need_ a full charge to get home, and it's better than being stuck in the past indefinitely."

"Can't argue with that," Jiya admitted. "Okay, give me the crash course while we get ready."

#

Lucy had a hard time keeping her mouth from falling open.

It wasn't the elegance of their surroundings, though she and Garcia were standing just inside the entryway of a large and well-decorated house, with intricate designs on the ceiling and Turkish rugs on the floor. It was... it was...

Kids chased each other through the hall. Near the parlor, two well-dressed women stood in an intense discussion. Though the open door of the big room on the right, Lucy could see two groups of people: one bent over books, one sitting together in heated conversation. More kids were playing on the stairs, and two women— one a resident, by her clothes, the other probably a neighborhood mother— were sitting with a baby on a sofa by the far end of the drawing room.

The door behind them opened. In her peripheral vision, Garcia turned, but didn't tense. The woman who'd answered the door for them— Lucy hadn't recognized her face— had promptly had to turn and greet a distraught woman who spoke little English, and had escorted her farther into the house to find someone who could interpret, leaving Lucy and Garcia alone.

"J. Lathrop is here!" one of the boys shouted as he ran. Lucy turned, and came face to face with the first woman to run a federal bureau, twenty years later. She didn't appear to notice Lucy and Garcia, but whatever she said to the boy made him laugh as she moved towards the two ladies in the back, valise in hand.

"I think that's Florence Kelley," Lucy told Garcia in an undertone, looking at one of the ladies. "She broadened the House's focus from relieving individual needs to attacking systematic oppression." She shook her head, awed. "I can't tell you what this place means to me."

"You don't have to. I can see your face," he said drily. Or, at least, he probably intended it to come out drily. The expression in his eyes was a little too warm for that, though his mouth was solemn.

The knot of women broke up, and Florence sailed towards them. "Ah, totees!"

Lucy would have loved nothing more than to be led around Hull House, just like one of the wealthy visitors Florence was assuming they were. But they had a job to do. "Actually we were hoping to speak to Miss Addams," she said. "I know she's very busy, but we're afraid she's in danger."

Florence gave them a piercing look. "Who are you?"

"Our name is Thompkins," Garcia said. "We're visiting from Cleveland. We're great admirers of this place. We're philanthropists ourselves. But in speaking with some industrialist friends of our hosts— who are not, shall we say, so admiring?— they let slip a hint of trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" The woman who was in the process of facing down entire industries built on child labor didn't appear in the least daunted.

"The kind where they plant a bomb and blame anarchists," Lucy said bluntly.

Florence looked at her for a long moment. Lucy felt uncomfortably transparent. "Yes; Jane's here," Florence said finally. "I'll take you to her."

She led them towards the front parlor. Lucy had just a moment to go, _is that Mary Kenney??_ and remind herself not to freak out before they were past the red-headed labor activist and crossing the parlor.

And then they were in the octagonal office _with_ _Jane Addams_ , and the reminding-herself-not-to-freak-out went double. Quadruple.

 _Oh my God oh my God oh my God it's Jane Addams_ , her internal monologue went. Super cool. Not freaking out at all. Nope.

 _This job does have its moments_ , she heard Rufus's voice echo in her head.

Standing in front of this serious-looking woman who was going to shake the world of labor on its foundations, Lucy suddenly realized that they were nearly the same age. _And what exactly are you doing with_ your _life, dear?_

_Saving the world. Back off._

Jane didn't even notice them come in. "My father was the only man in the Illinois Senate no one dared offer a bribe." She was standing near the window, a letter in her hand, looking agitated. "How could they possibly— What have _I_ done wrong?"

"Someone offering you fifty thousand dollars doesn't mean you've done anything wrong," Florence said bluntly. "It means all they know about you is they think you're dangerous."

Jane looked up, a visibly runaway train of thought arrested.

"Jane, this is Mr. and Mrs. Thompkins. Philanthropists from Cleveland." Florence turned to them. "Tell her what you told me."

"We think someone's trying to destroy Hull House and blame anarchists," Lucy told her, because she wanted to talk to Jane for _hours_ , but not when this was all in danger. "Have you seen a red-headed woman with freckles l— uh, han— uh, nearby?"

Jane looked bewildered. "Destroy us? A red-headed woman? Miss Culver?"

 _Oh my God_. Miss Culver owned the property, and had leased rent-free, or straight-out given, various parts of it to them. Was the woman who'd made Hull House possible really Emma as a sleeper agent? Lucy felt stunned and horrified and panicked.

Then her senses caught up with her. There was no way Emma could've lived a double life in the 19 th  century that long, and if she'd just been popping in and out, they would've noticed the jumps. "No," Lucy said. "Not her."

"You know Miss Culver?" Jane looked confused. She started tidying the surface of the big desk, put the letter down, picked it up again, and then dropped it on the desk. "Who's planning to destroy us?"

Two more woman came in. The one in front was dark-haired with glasses, the one trailing behind, tall and blonde. Lucy recognized them both.

"Trouble?" Ellen Starr asked. "Who this time? John Powers again?"

"Industrialists," Florence told her, watching Jane.

Jane started pacing. "I expected to become a target. It was naive of me not to expect them to target the house as well."

Garcia privately looked like he agreed, but he didn't say anything. Jane stopped, straightened several things on the desk with a motion that looked automatic, and resumed pacing.

The taller woman stopped her in her tracks, firmly wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, and handed her a cup of tea. Jane looked up at her with a warm smile so different from the worried look she'd just been wearing that Lucy felt she didn't have any right to see it.

Right. Mary Rozet Smith: the _other_ great love of Jane's life.

Ellen, too, had seen it. She dropped her gaze to the ground, though she didn't look surprised. How she _did_ look smote Lucy to the heart just as thoroughly as Jane's look at Mary had. "The plumber's here," Ellen said brusquely. "That's what I came to tell you. I'll go deal with him."

"I'll go." Florence turned to leave the room.

" _I'll_ go." Jane put her tea down. "I found the problem, I can explain more quickly than either of you."

"I'll come with you, if I may." Garcia was somehow already at her side.

Florence looked at him askance.

"I assure you, Mr. Thompkins," Jane said, "I'm perfectly capable of dealing with a tradesman."

"I would never suggest otherwise," Garcia said, "but I'd like to see the house. I can, ah, tell you more of the conversation we overheard."

Which meant Lucy and Garcia would have to get their stories straight later.

"If your heart's that set on it," Jane said with a slight smile.

"Thank you." He gestured for her to precede him out the door. They exited, leaving Lucy alone with these other _not at all_ _intimidating,_ driven, accomplished women.

For a moment, there was silence. Then Florence turned to Lucy. "Who were these industrialists, and what did they say? We need all the details we can if we go to the police."

She and Garcia were, objectively, very bright. So why, oh why, did they never think their plans through more thoroughly?

"Mrs. Thompkins, would you like any tea?" Mary asked quietly.

"Oh— no, no thank you. We, uh, that is, my husband and I—"

The gunshot went off during her second sentence.

Lucy ran for the hall. "Stay here and barricade the door!"

"Have you taken leave of your senses?" Ellen demanded, close on her heels. Whether that referred to Lucy running towards the shot or the prospect of Ellen staying here when Jane might be in danger, Lucy didn't stop to ask.

Indistinct shouting from the back of the house. "Where's the back door?" Lucy demanded.

"Follow me." Ellen slipped ahead of her. No, Lucy definitely did not want the important historical figure between herself and the Rittenhouse agent who would want to shoot at her—

Lucy darted ahead, prompting a frustrated noise from Ellen. Another shot— Garcia's voice— running footsteps—

Someone nearly plowed into them from a side hallway. Lucy shoved Ellen farther behind her—

"Whoa, it's me!" Wyatt lowered his gun. Jiya was right behind him.

"They're that way—" Lucy pointed.

"Okay, stay back."

"What is going on?" Ellen demanded. "Who are you?"

"Uh, we, uh," Lucy said, looking for the nearest safe room as Wyatt took off in the direction of the shots.

"Someone's trying to kill you," Jiya said.

A figure loomed out of the hallway—

Garcia, with Jane right behind him.

Wyatt and Garcia figured out each other's identities in time not to shoot. "Where'd they go?" Wyatt demanded. "Who was it?"

"It was the plumber, and he came this way!"

"No one's been past here," Lucy said.

They looked at each other.

"The basement," Jane said. "The stairs are off that hallway."

"Here?" Lucy put her hand on a knob before Wyatt shouldered her out of the way.

"No, that goes down to the coal cellar," Jane said, and pointed to another door.

"That... actually sounds like a great place for a bomb," Lucy said, but Wyatt and Garcia were already flanking the basement door.

Okay then. "We have to get everyone out," she said to Jiya.

"Where?" Jiya demanded. "There's a bomb in here and Rittenhouse could be outside."

"We are not going anywhere without an explanation," Jane said. Ellen just stared fiercely.

"The explanation is that someone's trying to kill you with a bomb in your basement. Come on." Lucy pushed Jane ahead of her. Jiya reached back and grabbed Ellen's wrist when she balked. "We need your help evacuating the building!"

They hadn't gone far when three shots rang out from the basement. Someone screamed in fear near the front of the building. "Lucy?" Wyatt called.

She stopped and turned back. "We're here!"

"It's okay, he hadn't armed the bomb yet!"

Which meant, if Rittenhouse had others outside, then the ladies and their neighbors were safer in here after all.

Ellen grabbed a lamp and led the way down the basement stairs before Jiya or Lucy could stop her. Garcia was searching the dead Rittenhouse agent, who lay crumpled in the middle of the floor; Wyatt was very carefully disassembling the bomb. It was small and sinisterly high-tech, very out of place with their surroundings. Jane and Ellen stopped short when they saw it, eyes wide, but that was all. They were made of stern stuff.

Jane looked from Lucy to Garcia. "You are not philanthropists," she said. "I would like an explanation." Garcia was still displaying a very modern gun, and Wyatt held the bomb, yet she stared them down without flinching.

Despite their surroundings, the dead body, and the bomb, Lucy felt a little thrill run through her. She was seeing the same grit that would reshape Progressive politics for decades.

Running footsteps. Garcia snapped his gun up, but lowered it again when he saw Florence at the top of the stairs. "What is going on?" she demanded.

"That's what we'd all like to know," Ellen said.

All right, time to stop fangirling and... the mission. "You're right," Lucy said. "We're not philanthropists. We're detectives. We found out that someone was going to try to hurt you, and we came here."

"Why didn't you go to the police?"

"They wouldn't have taken us seriously." Going to the authorities with no evidence was a strategy they'd used before— the Hindenburg, Hinckley— but it wasn't Lucy's first choice.

Ellen, Jane, and Florence exchanged looks among themselves.

"This whole story is implausible, and yet there's the incontrovertible evidence of a body in our basement," Florence said.

"We'll get rid of that for you," Wyatt said. "When it's dark."

"Shouldn't you take _that_ to the police?"

It was the Time Team's turn to exchange looks. "If they are who we think they are," Lucy said carefully, "they're from so far away that the police won't know what to do with them."

"All right, listen," Wyatt said. "We need to check the rest of the house just in case. Lucy, you come with me. You'll know if something's out of place—" He reached in the dead agent's jacket, and handed her the gun.

"How would she _possibly_ know if something's out of place?" Florence demanded. "And what are you doing with that weapon?"

"She's protecting you in case they come back," Jiya snapped.

"And who exactly _are_ 'they'?"

Florence Kelley's arguments were legendary. Lucy intervened before she could start one with Jiya: "They're members of a secret group that oppose change and progress across American history. They targeted you because Hull House is so important."

"Important enough to bomb? I think you're overstating matters," Florence said.

"I'm really, really not."

"Debate club later," Wyatt said firmly. "Flynn, Jiya, you find a safe spot for the ladies."

"Mary and Julia were evacuating everyone out the front door," Florence said.

Oh, good. Except, _was_ it good? Could someone sneak inside when everyone came back in? Was a Rittenhouse sleeper posing as one of their neighbors?

The Mothership had made ten trips to the past in the six weeks the Lifeboat was grounded. Lucy tallied up all the times and places they'd found sleepers: World War I; the Darlington 500; Hollywood; 1934 Connecticut; 1936 Texas; 1919 New York; 80s DC; and the Civil War. Eight trips to plant sleepers...

And Emma had claimed to make multiple trips to wipe Amy out of existence.

If that was... true, then they should have found all the sleepers. But why couldn't Rittenhouse have planted multiple groups of sleepers at a time? Or taken more sleepers back when they went back to activate a different batch?

But there was really no need for Rittenhouse to plant a sleeper here, considering that people regularly came in off the street.

"If there's more danger—" Jane began.

"If there's more danger, you're too important to risk. Lucy, back me up here," Wyatt said.

"He's absolutely right. Please, just go with Gar— with these two, and we'll sort everything out later."

Finally, the three ladies started up the stairs, but not without comment. "You realize," Florence said over her shoulder, "that you've now called this man two different names between you, neither of which are Thompkins."

Lucy would let Garcia and Jiya deal with that one.

Wyatt shut the door behind them. "Okay, we'll start at the back door and work our way towards the front. It seems like the house is busy enough that someone would've noticed someone planting something obvious."

"Unless they just left something innocuous-looking in a corner somewhere," Lucy pointed out.

"True—"

The back door was standing wide open. From Wyatt's face, they hadn't left it like that. He shut the door and drew the heavy bolt.

"They can't have gotten far," he said grimly. "The lowest level is still our best shot. We'll check the basement—"

"I'll check the coal cellar."

"Be _careful_ ," Wyatt said softly as they turned the corner. "You're _just_ looking. And if you see anything, stay back and come get me."

"Okay."

He gave her one last long look, then opened the basement door. When no one shot at him, he ducked into the darkness.

Lucy watched him go, then turned to the coal cellar door and squared her shoulders. She could do this. All she had to do was _look_. It would be a small room and it would be obvious if anyone were in there or had been in there—

But what if there was coal in there and they'd hidden something under it?

Only one way to find out. Much less gracefully, she imitated Wyatt's open-the-door-and-get-out-of-the-way move. No shots. But it was _dark_ down there. She stepped carefully on the top step—

A hard blow from behind sent her tumbling down.

She landed painfully with a _crash_ on something hard, and cried out, but she'd lost her breath and nothing came out. She lay there, stunned. Everything hurt. She couldn't see. Oh God—

All right. All right. Think. She hadn't heard anyone. Definitely no one was pointing a gun at her. She didn't think she'd broken anything—

But someone had _pushed_ her.

She sat up fast, and discovered she couldn't see because that _crash_ had been the door closing behind her.

She felt frantically around her. She'd landed on a pile of coal. Where was the floor? She fumbled forward on her hands and knees on the shifting rock until she reached something sturdy. There. The stairs. She crawled up the treads, trying to keep her breathing steady, trying to remember Harry Houdini, a year from now: _fear isn't real_.

She reached the door, guided by a thin sliver of light coming under it, and tried the knob. Locked.

"WYATT!" she screamed.

In response, she heard a barrage of gunshots.

She ducked back and tumbled painfully down the stairs again. At the bottom, she scooted around the corner of the tiny room in case a bullet came through the door. Darkness all around her— the walls seemed to close in on her—

 _Fear. Isn't. Real._ She closed her eyes and pictured Harry's hand reaching out of the wall towards her.

When she opened her eyes again, the darkness wasn't quite so thick. Her eyes had adjusted to—

... to a faint red glow coming from under the coal.

She crawled forward and scrabbled in the pile with her hands. The glow got brighter, and she dug more carefully, terrified of what she was going to find.

Finally, the countdown on the detonator stared back at her: _3:49._

She froze.

_3:48. 3:47. 3:46._

" _WYATT!_ "

Running footsteps. More gunshots. No answer.

 _OhGodohGodohGod_ —

Crashing furniture. Something thudded against the door. Jiya's voice, shouting something indistinct. Then more shots— and quiet.

"Where's Lucy?" Garcia demanded, quite close, out of breath.

"I'M DOWN HERE AND THERE'S A BOMB!"

"Lucy?!" Wyatt was also right there. Someone tried the door. "Where's the key?" he demanded.

" _THERE'S A BOMB!_ "

"Just stay calm, we'll—"

"What kind of bomb?" Garcia's voice.

"I, I don't know, it has a digital detonator and the timer says—" Her voice broke. "3:29."

"The key should be on top of the sill." Jane sounded puzzled. "It was definitely there this morning."

"He must've thrown it down after her." Wyatt sounded grim. "Jiya, check the body—"

"I just did. He doesn't have it."

"Then we'll have to break it down— damn you, let _go!_ "

"You could _set off the bomb_ ," Garcia said.

"What are we supposed to do, leave Lucy there? Go to hell!"

"What about the outside door?" Garcia demanded.

"It's, it's locked," Ellen replied. Hadn't Jiya and Garcia been supposed to get her and Jane _out_ of there? "And it's badly corroded. It barely opens from the outside."

She was going to die. She was going to die in three minutes and ten seconds, down here, in this tiny dark space, from a Rittenhouse bomb, because she'd been stupid. "Go!" she yelled. "Get out of here! Get the ladies out of here!"

"Lucy, you're going to have to disarm it!" Wyatt called down.

"I don't know anything about bombs and I can't _see!_ " Her voice broke. She swallowed a sob. "Go! Run!"

"Lucy!" Garcia's voice. "I'm sliding my phone under the door. It has a light."

She swallowed again, then scrambled clumsily up the stairs as the light lit up the whole place. "Oh God," she murmured.

"What was _that_?" Jane sounded bewildered.

She grabbed it, then nearly dropped it down the stairs because her hands were shaking so badly. "I— I have it!" She could see her prison clearly now, the pile of coal, the slanted door that offered no escape— and the bomb.

Light. Thank God. But now the walls she could see so clearly seemed to bear down on her— and—

"Describe the bomb!" Wyatt yelled.

"It's— it's, um—" Wait, she could do better than _that_. She pressed frantically at the surface of the phone, then took several photos. "I'm sliding the phone back under the door!" She hated to let go of her light— but—

Wyatt's fingers snatched the phone off the floor, and then her light was gone. She pressed herself to the door and tried not to whimper.

"Okay." Wyatt's voice was right there, just on the other side of the door, but it was too thick, too solid— "Okay, I'm giving it back. And here's Ellen's sewing scissors. I'll walk you through what to do."

"Can't you pick the lock?" Lucy begged.

"We don't have any picks." Garcia sounded grim.

"Lucy," Wyatt said. "You need to open up the back of the detonator, and then you'll need to snip the longest wire that you see there. It'll be coiled around the outside. But you can't touch any of the other wires."

Her fingers closed convulsively around the precious light.

"You can do this, Lucy. You have to do this. You can save Hull House. Come on."

Lucy grabbed the scissors and hurried down the stairs. "Jiya, get J— get Miss Addams and Miss Starr out of there. _Please_." She bent over the— the bomb.

"Okay," Jiya said. "We're going now."

She needed Wyatt to help with the bomb, but— "Garcia, you too—"

"Not a chance. Just disarm the damn thing, Lucy."

" _Just_ ," she muttered under her breath, crouching over it. _Open up the back of the detonator_ . But _how_? She finally managed to wedge the tip of the scissors in the case and use that as leverage to get the back part off. And then there were the wires. She picked up the scissors.

"... the longest wire?" she called.

"Coiled around the outside! You see it?"

"Um." She peered inside. There was one marginally longer than the others, but—

" _Right next to the case!_ "

Oh, _that_ wire. "It's grey!" she yelled.

"Cut it!"

She put the scissors down hastily. "My hands are shaking."

"Lucy." Garcia's voice was firm. "Take a slow breath. You'll be all right."

She tried. It escaped her as a sob. She tried again, managed to breathe in all the way, and all the way out. She did it again. She picked up the scissors and cut the wire.

She was almost startled when she didn't die.

"The numbers went off!" she called.

"The— the detonator?" Wyatt's voice cracked. "The numbers on the face of the detonator disappeared?"

"... yes, is that—" Had she—

"No, you did it! Just— hang on—"

"Stay as far from the door as you can," Garcia called.

Lucy grabbed the phone and the scissors, and flattened herself against the wall. A loud _crash_ , another, and light streamed in, the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen. Another _crash_ , and Wyatt bolted down the stairs.

He went straight for the bomb. "Is it—" Lucy demanded. She tried to run _up_ the stairs, but her legs were suddenly weak.

"Yeah, you did it." His smile seemed to light up the tiny cellar. "Flynn!" he called. "Go stop the ladies before they go too far, Rittenhouse might have others!"

"I'm never coming back to Chicago again," Lucy babbled, on the verge of hysterics. "Every time I do some madman locks me in a tiny enclosed space, and—"

"Shhhhhhh, shh shh shh." Wyatt pulled her into his arms. "It's okay. You did it. You were great, Lucy."

She clung to him and tried not to cry, and then gave up on trying. And then she realized she was _still in the coal cellar_ , and she let go of him to bolt up the stairs.

The hallway. Thank God. It had seemed a little cramped before, but now it was _wonderful._ She leaned against the wall and breathed and tried not to stare at the dead Rittenhouse agent and tried to stop shaking. Wyatt followed her up the stairs more slowly—

Garcia rounded the corner, and his quiet, profound relief when he saw her, his slow exhale, went straight to her heart. Jiya was right behind him. Her eyes widened, and she came forward to pull Lucy into a hug. That felt really, really good. Lucy shuddered.

"Mrs. Thompkins, I am so sorry," Ellen said, following Garcia and Jiya, with Jane on her own heels. "I have no idea why we're being targeted—"

"Because you're going to go on to do really important things," Lucy said, straightening up and steadying her voice, "and people want to stop you and blame anarchists, to disable the budding labor movement."

Ellen looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

"Look." Wyatt glanced at the now-disassembled bomb in his hands. "I think we'd better stay here, at least for the night. If you get everyone out—"

"Turn them away?" Jane sounded horrified.

"You already evacuated, right?" Wyatt said. "Tell them it's a gas leak."

"But they're our neighbors, we're here to help them."

"And you do," Lucy told Jane. "You are going to do _so_ much good for _so_ many people, J— Miss Addams. You already have! But right now, just for tonight, your neighbors are better off in their own homes. Because it's not safe here."

Jane and Ellen exchanged a long look.

"Very well," Jane finally said, with reluctance. "We'll send everyone but the residents home."

As Jane, Ellen, and Jiya headed towards the front of the house, Lucy realized she still had Garcia's phone. She held it out to him. When he took it, his fingers brushed hers, and they were so warm and she was still shaken enough that she sighed.

His expression softened, but he didn't move until she did. When she put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, he wrapped one arm around her back and carefully cradled her head with his other hand. That was the nice thing about hugging Garcia. He was big enough to block out the world.

They stayed like that for a while. He didn't let go until she did. When she stepped back, she frowned at the change in color of his clothes, looked down at herself, and realized she was covered in coal dust.

Wyatt glanced up from searching the body. His look at the two of them spoke volumes, but he didn't actually open his mouth.

Four residents and three time travelers gathered in the parlor. Wyatt drew the curtains and made them all stay towards the center of the room. Garcia was checking the rest of the house for open windows, and searching the unused rooms.

"We must reopen tomorrow," Ellen said. "We have the Boys' Club, the sewing class, the Greek philosophy class—"

"— two union meetings, the working women's group, a meeting of the factory investigation committee—" Florence broke in.

"— the kindergarten," Mary Smith put in from the doorway, carrying in a tray of mugs. Mary Keyser, Hull House's ostensible housekeeper, came behind her with another.

"— and half a dozen other things," Julia finished. "The point is, we can't go on like this."

"We know," Lucy said. "We'll find out who's doing this as soon as we can."

"We have two dead bodies and two bombs," Ellen said. "Why not take them to the police?"

"The police?" Lucy said. "The same police who the saloon owners bribe to cover up their crimes? You don't think someone could pay them enough to make them look the other way?"

The other women exchanged grimaces. No one disagreed. Someone passed Lucy a mug; it turned out to hold hot chocolate.

"How do we know they didn't follow _you_ here?" Florence asked. "We had no trouble until you came to the door."

"The plumber was one of them, Florence," Jane pointed out. "And we called him last night."

This time, the looks they exchanged were uneasy.

"The four of us will take shifts and watch out for any more of them," Wyatt said. "And—"

"Four of us?" Ellen asked. "There are ten of us."

"Yeah, but—"

Wyatt was not going to win this one. Lucy exchanged looks with Jiya, and stayed out of it.

Five minutes later, they had a roster of who would watch, where, when. Lucy had enjoyed maybe more than she should have, watching these formidable ladies make it very clear to him he wouldn't keep them out of efforts to protect their own home. Wyatt himself was formidable, in his element. That was why she enjoyed it.

He gave her a sidelong glance, making it clear he hadn't missed her reaction. But, hey. How many chances did you get to see the women of Hull House demonstrate exactly the qualities that made them such a political force to be reckoned with?

"Thanks for the support there, Lucy," he muttered as their council of war broke up.

She smiled at him and drained the last of his cocoa. "I'm sure you could say something tactical about recognizing a hopeless battle when you see one."

He made the aggrieved face that was his equivalent of rolling his eyes. "So, uh." He glanced across the room. "Thought you said Ellen was the love of Jane's life." Ellen was off to one side, and Mary and Jane were conferring in low voices. Mary turned away, Jane touched her arm, and she turned back for one last comment from Jane.

"One of them," Lucy said, voice equally soft. "Ellen and Jane founded Hull House together, but they drifted apart over the years. Especially after Mary began coming here, and she and Jane became... close."

"Huh," Wyatt said. "Poor Ellen."

His tone carried such a wealth of obvious meaning that Lucy almost couldn't believe he'd said it. Had they been anywhere else, she would have done more than shoot him an incensed look.

Mary herself interrupted before... before. "Mrs. Thompkins, you've been heroically staying off of our furniture," she said, with a smile, "but perhaps you'd like a bath and some clothes?"

Mary Keyser helped Lucy out of her corset, and brought her a voluminous dressing gown one of the ladies was willing to lend her. Then she left her alone. Lucy washed the worst of the coal dust off— in addition to being liberally smeared on her face and hands and in her hair, it had somehow found its way under her clothes— rinsed the tub, and let the hot water run.

It was likely coming straight from Lake Michigan. But the seductive promise of _clean_ overcame her scruples, and besides, she wouldn't find any other water in this town. She just... wouldn't get it in her mouth. Or eyes.

The hot water stung cuts and scrapes she hadn't even noticed getting, making her worry about germs all over again. She'd stay in just a few minutes to get clean...

But the heat eased the low-grade ache that seemed a permanent part of her muscles these days, and eased the knots of tension that had taken up residence in her shoulders, back, and neck. It seduced her into lingering. She felt herself relax, really _relax_ , in a way she hadn't in a long, long time, that way you didn't know how badly you needed until you felt it.

Besides, until Mary found her some clothes, Lucy didn't have anything to put on besides that dressing gown.

Finally the thought of Rittenhouse prodded her into motion. She cleaned up, dried off, and headed for the bedroom Mary had told her to use. For about half a second she was startled to find Garcia there, lurking by the window and watching the street below. Right. Married. The ladies had, despite Lucy's lack of a wedding ring, apparently not realized that part was as fictional as "philanthropists from Cleveland."

It wasn't a problem; they were already roommates in the 21 st  century, anyway. More importantly, there were clean clothes on the bed.

"I was starting to think you'd gone down the drain," Garcia said, not looking up.

She rolled her eyes at him. Did he have any idea how long it'd been since she'd had anything besides a quick lukewarm shower? "Anything out there?"

He shook his head. "No. Just keeping an eye out. This window has the best view of the back door of anywhere in the house." He glanced up. "I'll, ahhhh..."

At the house, she usually changed in the bathroom. "No, it's fine, just—" She motioned for him to turn around. He did, staring scrupulously out the window.

She struggled into the "combination," the bizarre Victorian camisole-with-drawers that was popular right now. Ugh, the only thing worse than wearing open-crotch drawers in the 19 th  century was _not_ wearing them, and then barely being able to pee. "And in a hundred years this look'll be restricted to porn," she muttered.

" _... what?_ "

"Nothing." Equally strange to think she was... might be... she wasn't sure just _whose_ clothes she was wearing, but there were no options that weren't overwhelming. _I'm wearing the_ underwear _of a powerhouse of the progressive movement._

_Yeah, we do lead weird lives._

Next, she shrugged into the corset and held it loosely against her, then considered. "Can you lace up this torture device, or should I call someone?"

"Come here and I'll do it."

Mindful of the drawers, she wrapped the dressing gown awkwardly around her waist, then stood in front of him. He carefully tightened the laces as she directed him. "You sure you want these this tight?"

"No, but I want to fit into that dress and this is the only way."

"This is barbaric," he muttered.

He finished doing up the corset, then turned back to the window. Lucy struggled into the bustle, and then the dress itself. She winced when her corset pressed against what felt like a tremendous bruise forming on her ribcage. From being pushed down the stairs, no doubt.

"Could've been worse," she muttered. "Could've been an oven."

Garcia frowned. "What could've been an oven?"

"The first time I was here? Next year?" _With you_ , she definitely didn't have to add. "H. H. Holmes locked me in his— crematorium."

Garcia turned completely away from the window. "He _what?_ "

"He... grabbed me when I went to get Rufus and Wyatt out."

He stared at her, looking quietly horrified. Then he looked down, tongue easing along his top lip. "Lucy, I—" He looked at her again. "I'm sorry."

"I know," she said after a minute. "Thank you." She knew why he'd done it all. She still deserved, and appreciated, the apology.

Sometimes she wondered what would've happened if she hadn't stopped him. She never said that to him. What would it do besides frustrate him?

She turned her attention to the more immediate problem of her hair. Modern shampoo hadn't been invented yet, so she'd washed her hair with soap, and it was now a dry, unmanageable mess. She could ask for help, but she stubbornly resisted. She might be impersonating a woman for whom the prevailing cultural norms had stacked the deck to make it difficult for her to tend herself without help, but, damnit, she was _actually_ an egalitarian woman from the twenty-first century. She could comb her own damn hair.

Despite the frustration of the tangles, the relaxation of the hot water lingered. "Amy and I used to go to the spa," she found herself saying after a minute or two. "A little one, a few hot tubs and saunas."

He didn't speak, his gaze on the street below, but she knew he was listening.

"It started out as celebrating. If she did well on an exam, or I was invited to give a talk... birthdays, job offers... things like that. Then we just made it a regular thing, and our joke was that we were falling down on the accomplishments."

Even a little, un-hip place like that hadn't been cheap on two student budgets, but they'd both saved their pennies for that once-a-month sister date. They'd always followed it with tea and pastries at the little tea house up the street.

God, Lucy missed her so much it ached.

"If she's anything like you, it's hard to imagine her failing to be impressive on a regular basis."

She felt a rush of warmth and gratitude at his use of the present tense. And at the compliment. "She... she is. She's so amazing." She choked a bit on that last word.

They sat in silence as Lucy fought through another two inches of hair.

"Lorena, ahhhh..." He touched his tongue to his top lip. "Saw some girlfriends every few weeks."

Lucy put the comb down.

"They went to the baths, sometimes. She'd have her, uh, special night out with her friends, and Iris and I..." He paused for a while. "Would have a special night in."

"That sounds lovely," Lucy said, equally soft.

"It was." His voice was rough.

She worked her way through the rest of the tangles before she said, "Garcia?"

He looked at her.

"I'm... I'm honored that you tell me about her." She paused as he watched her, eyes wide and sad. "She must've been an amazing woman."

He turned quickly away. "She was." Voice, rougher; words, clipped.

Lucy put the comb on the vanity and quietly crossed the room. She put her hand on his shoulder. His head jerked up. He stared at her, eyes reddened, with a hint of that wild grief from the basement in 1954.

He looked out the window again, and covered her hand with his own.

Lucy let her hand linger a minute, then let go and cleared her throat. "Earlier," she said. "I told you to get out of there and you didn't."

"I wasn't gonna leave you."

"Garcia—"

"Not when I could help. I'm not... questioning Wyatt's expertise," he said, very carefully, "or his ability to, uhhh...." He didn't finish that thought.

_Talk me down?_

She wasn't going to retroactively micromanage his tactical decisions. Instead, she just said, "One day you might have to."

Before he remembered to keep his attention on the street, he gave her a desperate, wild-eyed look, startling in its resemblance to the Flynn she'd first met rather than the Garcia who was now her friend.

"What?" she added. "You were willing to sacrifice me before, but not now?"

It was a valid point. But an unnecessarily stupid, combative way to put it. Why his refusal to leave had her spoiling for a fight...

She'd think about that later.

His low growl seemed to indicate he concurred. "I was never willing to sacrifice you until you walked into that basement in 1954," he bit out. "I'm well aware that this whole damn war has put you through hell and that I'm responsible for a large part of that. And if I thought a damned _apology_ would fix that, I would talk myself hoarse, Lucy."

"I'm not asking you— and that was _Ritten_ —"

"I put you in danger. I put you in terrible situations that I hoped to control, knowing I was playing with fire and _you_ would be the one to get burned. I honestly don't know if that's meaningfully any different. But never— not until the end— you surprised me and I was, uh... desperate." His voice rasped off into nothingness.

After a long moment, he added quietly, "My, uh, men had standing orders not to hurt you."

An equally long moment before she said, "I've always wondered why you had us arrested in 1937, instead of—"

"... yes," he admitted.

She hesitated. "Just listen to me for a minute, okay?"

He continued to watch the street, but made an open-handed _go ahead_ gesture.

"I don't know how much you know," she said quietly. "After Agent Christopher—" She closed her eyes, because it still hurt to think about this. And if it hurt _her_ , how much more did it hurt _him?_

"Arrested me."

She opened her eyes, a little startled. "Yes." She paused. "We were going to get Amy back." Her voice came out flat and weary. "But when— when my mom never met my dad, and Amy never was born, my mom _also_ never got lung cancer. So— I thought—" She swallowed.

"... I thought I owed it to her to try— to explain. And to tell her how much I loved her."

He took his attention off the street then, and looked at her with a pained expression. A look of soft reproach.

Lucy swallowed. "She captured me then," she said crisply. "I woke up in Rittenhouse headquarters, and..."

Six weeks, she'd spent there.

"... I refused to do what they wanted. At first. I thought someone would come for me."

"But then I read about the explosion at Mason Industries. I... knew Rufus and Wyatt had been there. I thought they were dead—" Her throat threatened to close up on her. "And the Lifeboat destroyed."

It was easier to say this next part when he was watching the street, not her. "So I gave in. I told them— I told them whatever they wanted to hear, to make them think I was really one of them." What she'd said was still bitter and foul in her mouth, all these months later.

"Because I knew I was the only one left. I knew I had to get them to take me in the Mothership, and find a way to destroy it. I'd do whatever I had to to make that happen."

Garcia winced, but kept his eyes on the street.

"We went back to 1918 and I stole some grenades," she said quietly. "I planned to blow up the Mothership while we were all in it. Me, Emma, my mother. It would've been over, Garcia."

He closed his eyes, and touched his tongue to his top lip. Maybe having this conversation while he was trying to keep watch wasn't the best idea, but it had felt... necessary.

"Or I could've blown the Mothership up where we'd left it, and taken my chances in World War I. But..." She hesitated. "Wyatt and Rufus came for me before I could. Emma caught me, Wyatt saved me, and... I didn't have the chance."

It still haunted her, how she'd missed her chance to end all of this.

"But I was willing," she finished quietly. "Garcia, when I told you that I was willing to do anything now, I meant it."

He didn't say anything, and she was relieved. Surely he had to acknowledge the tactical soundness of what she'd said. She continued to comb her hair.

"So, like how Jiya was willing to sacrifice herself?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. "That was—"

"Don't insult either of our intelligences by saying 'different.'"

She glared at the back of his head.

"What was that message she left, again?" he added. "'Don't come,' right? And yet... we did. Do you think that was a mistake, Lucy? After all, Rufus—"

"Of course not!"

He gave her one pointed look, as if to say, _well, then_ , and turned back to the street.

She finished combing her hair in a disgruntled silence. "I'm going downstairs," she muttered.

Julia and Jane were just coming out of the drawing room. "Were you looking for Mr. Logan?" Julia asked. "He's in there."

Wyatt was sitting by the curtains of the big window, watching the front of the house. He'd be barely visible, if not invisible, from the street.

Lucy took a few steps inside. "You, uh... told them your real name?"

"Yeah, Mrs. Thompkins, I did."

Lucy almost regretted coming in here.

He gave her a slightly abashed look, then looked back to the street. "And Jiya and I didn't really need cover identities like the two of you did, so... We didn't plan 'em."

"Garcia's... watching upstairs."

"I know. Florence is in the office."

He was trying to keep watch on the house. Maybe she should just go away and not distract him. She certainly hadn't helped Garcia's concentration. But she stayed where she was.

"I, uh," Wyatt said after a minute, in a more cheerful tone that was trying a little too hard. "Had an interesting chat with Julia and Jane just now. They told me their idea for the juvenile justice system."

"Yes," Lucy said. "About seven years and they'll get that going. First one in the country."

He made a self-deprecating noise. "Guess I should thank them." He glanced at her. "I, uh, got to know the one in Texas pretty well."

"Must've been tough," she said quietly after a minute. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah... well. You think everything's tough until it's over."

She tilted her head and watched him a minute. "I never really thought of it that way."

He glanced at her again, a little warm, a little soft, like the Wyatt she remembered.

"You wanna go make the rounds, check on everyone, make sure they haven't seen anything they wrote off as not important? You know... these civilians we're relying on for guard duty?"

"Don't underestimate them," she said over her shoulder as she left. "Supposedly, someone calls Jane the most dangerous woman in America."

Her next stop, after Florence, was the kitchen to check the door. "It's locked," Mary Smith assured her.

"Just checking," Lucy told her. "These people have been known to pick locks."

Mary raised her eyebrows, but said nothing, just put the kettle on. "Would you like some tea?"

"I'd love some tea. Let me check on, uh, Mr. Thompkins watching upstairs, and I'll be right back."

Garcia, as predicted, needed nothing and had seen nothing. He wasn't one of the inexperienced civilians Wyatt was concerned about. Lucy also checked on Ellen, who was watching the fourth side of the house. Then Lucy returned to the kitchen, telling herself that with all the approaches to the house being watched, there wasn't anything else she could do right now. So, if one of the ladies of Hull House was inviting her to sit and chat... _hell yes_ was she going to accept.

Mary was just coming back in. "I was carrying some to Jane," she explained. "She's had a cold and she's not taking care of it properly. Not in all this excitement."

"Mmm. Thank you." Lucy sipped her tea. "Will they be worried about you at home?" She knew Mary was the only one of the women present who wasn't a resident of the House. From a wealthy Chicago family, she still went home to them at the end of the day.

Mary shook her head. "I'll 'phone them to tell them I'm staying the night. They're used to that. Used to me spending all my time here. I don't think they understand why, though." She sounded a little wistful. "My father asked me, 'Mary, what do you _do_ with all those educated women all day?' He's a supporter of the House's mission, but I don't think he thinks _I_ belong here."

 _Well, that's just bullshit_. "You seem to belong here."

"I think I belong here, too," Mary said, quiet voice steady.

Lucy knew what she meant, though. Nearly all the women at Hull House were, if not college educated, outwardly ambitious. Mary Smith was a different sort of lady, who seemed to have contented herself without striving against the world in quite the same way as the others.

"It's a skill, you know," Lucy said. "Being able to make people comfortable like you do?"

Mary smiled. "Thank you."

Historians agreed that several decades of quiet, steady support from Mary, handling the mundane details of Jane's life, making sure she looked after herself— in other words, acting like a wife— had made it possible for Jane to accomplish what she did. And being here at Hull House, among these remarkable women, made it so abundantly clear to Lucy what people in her own time were still missing: making people comfortable, making a _place_ comfortable, was not a function of being a woman. It was a function of having a rare and specific talent. In the 21  st  century, the pendulum had maybe swung too far in the other direction, and people denigrated that kind of ability as just a silly woman thing.

It was a talent Lucy definitely didn't have, and not one a lot of people acknowledged. But if it disappeared, they would all notice in a hurry.

What the histories of the great organizing movements often omitted was the unexciting but critical contributions of making day-to-day life run smoothly— or at all. And those overlooked contributions were overwhelmingly from women. Who figured out how to feed people? Shelter people? Make sure they could bathe and do laundry? Handle a thousand other logistical details that no one ever thought about? And who got left out of the textbooks?

Lucy felt a book idea coming on.

She wasn't sure she ever expected to return to her 'real' life. It seemed so distant. But it couldn't hurt to write her idea _down_. "Do you have any paper?" she asked.

Mary obligingly started to search.

"What about that?" Lucy pointed to a loose sheet on the table.

"Oh, Jane said your husband found that the plumber's pocket. The back is blank." Mary passed it over.

Lucy scanned it quickly. It was a short note explaining to Miss Addams why her usual plumber couldn't come, but the bearer of this letter should prove an adequate substitute, etc etc... She turned it over.

She frowned, and held the paper closer to the lamp. She handed it to Mary. "Do you recognize that address? Is it where the plumber's from?"

Mary squinted. "What address?"

"At the bottom."

Mary stared hard. "Oh, dear. No, definitely not. That's the Levee District."

They gathered in the drawing room to discuss this new information. Ellen took over Garcia's perch at the back of the house so he could join them.

"You didn't mention this before?" Wyatt demanded after looking at the paper.

"No, somehow in the dim light of a kerosene lamp in a windowless basement, the tiny pencilled-in addition on the back completely escaped my notice," Garcia said.

"You think the people who are threatening us are there?" Jane asked. "I'll talk to them."

" _No_ ," Lucy said. "They're very, very dangerous, and they won't be swayed by appeals to their better nature. Not like the people you usually talk to. They're not like the hungry burglar who breaks into your bedroom and you tell to come back tomorrow and ask for a job... um, hypothetically." Damn it, had that even happened yet?

"My friends and I will look into this," she finished.

Julia examined the address again. "Saloons, brothels, gamblers, slavers. Are you sure you're up to this part of town?"

"I've seen worse," Jiya said drily.

Julia gave her a surprised look; she'd been very quiet so far.

"We'll come back when we're done there," Lucy added. "If we don't... go to the police then."

#

Shouldn't she be used to this after spending three years in the 1880s? But a brief return to a world of modern plumbing, where no one batted an eye at a woman in pants, corsets were reserved for fetish parties and bad pirate costumes, and, in theory (ha!) people had equal-ish rights regardless of their gender or race, had made her weak, apparently.

Part of it was probably having to pose as Wyatt's wife as they were trying to find a way into Hull House.

At least it was 1892, so they hadn't had to pretend to be all lovey-dovey and shit. That would've been like sandpaper on an open wound for both of them.

Now that cover story was over, and they were all crouched on the second story of a rundown warehouse, trying to figure out the best way in to the lair of one of the city's most notorious gangs. Simple, right?

"What about the gangs?" Wyatt asked. "What's Rittenhouse want with them?"

Lucy looked unsure. "Right now they're mostly destitute Irish American boys, though the Sicilians are starting to arrive. The local political bosses use them for their dirty work. I... honestly don't know what Rittenhouse wants with them. They're brutal enough, but they're not really _organized_ like the North Side Gang and Capone's Outfit will be in another generation." She shook her head. "They're basically just muscle."

"Capone," Wyatt mused. "Why is that ringing a bell? Oh, _right_. 'Cause Flynn, here, had him shoot Rufus."

They all looked at Wyatt.

"We all remember that, Wyatt," Lucy said.

"Just saying."

"No one's going in or out," Jiya said after a minute. "Where _are_ they?"

"They might be underground," Lucy suggested. "After the raising of Chicago—"

"You mean the fire?" Jiya asked.

"No, _raising_ , r-a-i-s-i-n-g. Most of the downtown area was physically elevated about four feet to put in sewers and solve the drainage problem."

"Wait," Jiya said. " _How?_ "

"Hydraulic jacks beneath the buildings."

"So..." Wyatt said. "Chicago is literally jacked up? Explains so much."

Lucy glanced at him. "After the raising, criminals took over the space beneath the buildings and streets. Mostly it was the ones running the saloons and brothels, but they used the gangs to do their dirty work."

"A literal criminal underworld," Flynn said. "Great. What are we waiting for?"

"Will there be a way underground in that building?" Wyatt asked.

"Probably through the basement."

"Okay. Flynn and I will check it out. You two stay here—"

"Oh, you're _all_ coming with us."

_Shit!_

Six rough-looking men, each holding a revolver, stood in the doorway, blocking their escape. But the four of them had had the only door into this place under their eye the whole time, so how—

"Guess the tunnels lead under this building, too," Wyatt muttered.

"Shut up." The man in front brandished his revolver. "You, get over here."

The men roughly searched them one at a time. "I've never seen a gun like this before," the guy in charge said, turning Wyatt's pistol over in his hands. "Where'd you get it?"

"I thought you told me to shut up."

The man backhanded Wyatt, leaving him spitting blood. "The orders are to bring you alive. Didn't say nothing about unharmed. Now." He pointed the gun at Wyatt's kneecap. "Where'd you get this?"

"San Francisco," Wyatt said after a minute.

"They make guns like this in San Francisco? Hell!"

They were forced downstairs to the basement, then down another flight into a damp, disgusting sub-basement lit by lanterns. Jiya saw the look between Wyatt and Flynn at the top of the stairs, and could only hope that they were cooperating this far because they didn't think the time was right to strike, not because they thought the four of them were hopelessly outnumbered.

There were more goons downstairs. Across the low-ceilinged, smelly space was another set of stairs and another door. Jiya jumped at a load roaring overhead. The thug who had her yanked reactively on her arms, reminding her far too much of that Rittenhouse goon, Doug. Wagon wheels, she realized. They must be under the street.

The grunts across the room suddenly parted, most of them streaming up the back stairs. A man in a striped waistcoat watched them go, then turned around, hands in his pockets. He was sleek and well-fed, with dark hair and a neat mustache, entirely too well-groomed for their surroundings. "Ah, and here we have our other guests," he said, surveying them with a frown. "Although you're not so much guests as... pests." He looked past Jiya. "You three, get upstairs with the others. I told McDonald to come alone, but I suspect he's bringing the Garrity brothers."

Jiya felt the shudder of... revulsion? from the goon hanging on to her, before he let go and stepped forward. "Yes, Mr. Thorpe," he muttered, slid past her, and, with, his two fellow thugs, headed upstairs. That left just three guarding the four of them... but the two men behind Thorpe immediately took their places.

"Let go of the ladies," Thorpe chided them, when one of them grabbed Jiya's arms again. Jiya immediately wrenched free, and took a half-step forward. "I'm a gentleman... even if I suspect I'll shortly have to execute you all."

Wyatt snorted loudly. The goon guarding him, who was holding Wyatt at the point of his own gun, just as the other goon was doing with Flynn, hefted the weapon.

"Jeremiah S. Thorpe?" Lucy demanded. "Financier to the meat markets?"

He frowned. "Yes, do I know you?"

"No," she said. "But I know all about you— _rat!_ " she shrieked, and leapt backwards directly into her captor.

Lucy yanked the gun from his hand before he realized there was no rat. Jiya was already in motion, blocking her own captor's arm as he tried to get in position to shoot—

Wyatt lunged for his guard, too— Jiya could only watch in horror as that goon pulled the trigger of Wyatt's own gun—

But nothing happened.

Jiya used her captor's momentum against him to propel him between her and the others. She tried to knee him in the groin. When he got a hand in to deflect, she punched him in the face.

Flynn was free. He shot Wyatt's captor as Wyatt yanked Thorpe in front of him, just as the last goon by the door fired. Thorpe sagged. Lucy shouted in protest, but then—

Flynn shot Jiya's captor as Lucy's thug lunged for her with a long, wicked knife. Jiya yelled and leapt forward— he collided with Lucy, raking the blade down her back— shouting— confusion—

" _Don't kill him!_ " Lucy managed, doubled over.

Flynn paused, both hands around the disarmed man's neck. " _Lucy??_ "

Jiya grabbed her and helped her up. If they could just keep the muck out of that wound and get her back to the Lifeboat—

But—

But Lucy's dress under her hands was dry.

"The corset took the brunt of it." Lucy winced. The tail end of the thrust had found flesh near her shoulder, but it wasn't bad.

Jiya flinched at the sound of the bullet. Wyatt whirled, gun ready, but none of the goons—

"Upstairs," she said, her words almost drowned out by more rapid shots. Upstairs, and through the far door.

"Move!" Wyatt pointed to the door they'd come in through, but turned back to the other door. He grabbed a chair from the edge of the room, and wedged it under the doorknob.

"Thorpe—" Lucy began, even as Flynn hoisted his captive with one hand and tried to guide Lucy towards the door with the other.

Wyatt crouched and put two fingers on Thorpe's neck. "Dead." He quickly searched his pockets. "C'mon, let's go!"

Jiya grabbed a revolver from her dead guard, and two lanterns, as they hustled out of the sub-basement into the normal basement. "I wanted Thorpe alive," Lucy protested when they were all upstairs. "He's Rittenhouse!"

Wyatt frowned. "How do you know?"

"It was in my grandfather's files. His whole family is Rittenhouse. For generations. He—" She looked sideways at Flynn, then continued. "In a hundred and twenty two years, his great-grandson Jeremiah Wilcox—"

Flynn stiffened.

"— orders the hit on Garcia and his family."

Flynn's face was set like a mask. The silence was broken only by gunshots echoing across the street.

Wyatt grimaced. "Let's see what this one can tell us."

Flynn shoved his captive up against the dirt wall, the smaller man's feet dangling in the air. "What did Thorpe want?" he hissed. "Why are they shooting?"

Jiya almost felt sorry for the man. And she really didn't want to watch them torture him—

"I 'unno," the man whined, squirming fruitlessly. "They must be shooting 'cause of McDonald and his guys—"

"Who's McDonald?" Flynn demanded with a shake.

"Mike McDonald?" Lucy guessed. "Chicago's first political boss. He's practically an unelected king."

The captive nodded vigorously.

Lucy stepped closer. "Why was McDonald coming here?"

"He, uh, Mr. Thorpe don't never let none of us near his place, and Mr. Thorpe wasn't gonna go to the Store."

"The Store is McDonald's gambling palace," Lucy explained in an undertone. "No, I mean, why were the two men meeting?"

"I 'unno, I—"

Flynn boosted him farther up the wall and tightened his grip.

"I _don't_ , he just said— he had a business proposal for him— and some lady—"

"Let him go," Lucy commanded.

Flynn let go. The man slid down the wall and landed on his butt.

Lucy stared down at him. "What lady?"

"Mr. Thorpe didn't say— _but_ —" He preemptively flinched back from Flynn. "But Jem said he heard them talking and some red-haired lady met with Mr. Thorpe and wanted him to take a proposal to McDonald, something about some dough-faced upper-crust other nuisance lady. Some reformer."

They exchanged looks.

"Where's the red-haired lady now?" Lucy asked.

"Dunno— Mr. Thorpe thought she'd be here, and then said she wouldn't."

"What do you all do for Mr. Thorpe?"

"Whatever he tells us."

"Dirty jobs?"

The man looked down. "Yeah."

"Did Thorpe have any children?" Flynn growled.

Wyatt's head snapped up.

"I dunno, I told you, he never let us come around his place."

Wyatt and Lucy both eyed Flynn, with very different kinds of concern. Finally Lucy said, "So McDonald's over there having a shootout with Thorpe's men, and waiting for a proposal from him?"

The thug nodded.

"Okay," Lucy said. "Tell us how to get into that other building without getting shot. And you'll be coming with us, so you'd better tell the truth."

"What are you doing?" Wyatt asked in an undertone.

"Mike McDonald's expecting a meeting with a lady?" Lucy asked. "We'll give him one."

The goon knew a back way. He walked in front of them at the point of Flynn's gun. Lucy came next, then Jiya, then Wyatt brought up the rear. Jiya kept a careful eye on Lucy. She was looking a little pale. That knife wound hadn't been as bad as it could've been, but it had reopened her cut from 1850.

"Hey," Jiya asked Wyatt in an undertone. "That guy pointed your gun right at you and pulled the trigger. How are you alive?"

"He didn't know how to take the safety off a modern gun."

... huh. That was a detail Jiya probably wouldn't have even noticed.

"What's your plan, Lucy?" Wyatt asked Lucy after a minute.

"The plan is to figure out what McDonald knows, and then come up with the rest of the plan."

"What is he like? Can we, I don't know, appeal to his better nature?"

"He's brutal. He beats his wife and his father."

"Can we just shoot him?" Wyatt muttered.

The shooting had ended. Hopefully that didn't mean McDonald had left, or this would all be for nothing. On the other hand, if he were dead, that could be convenient.

The goon snuck them upstairs. "This was Mr. Thorpe's office. But it's locked."

"Here." Wyatt reached past Jiya with a key. "Found it in his pockets."

Flynn forced the goon to open the door, followed him in, and blocked the doorway until he was convinced it was clear. The nicely-furnished room, with a massive desk in the middle, contrasted starkly with the bare rest of the building.

"Fine." Lucy sat down behind the desk. "Go downstairs and bring McDonald up here."

The goon blanched.

"Do it and we'll pay you and let you go. Refuse, we'll take you to the police."

Reluctantly, with multiple backwards glances, he left the room.

"He's just going to bolt," Wyatt told her.

"No, he's not. He's skin and bones. He needs the money."

"What do you want us to do?" Flynn asked.

"Watch my back and look mean." Lucy straightened up, wincing as her back touched the back of the chair.

So Wyatt and Flynn stood behind her and flanked her, guns drawn, looking like extremely menacing bodyguards. Jiya decided to face the three of them from the back corner, her own stolen gun concealed in the folds of her skirt.

They heard cautious footsteps on the stairs. Just one man came in, small, well-dressed, with one hand in his coat pocket.

Lucy tilted her chin up. "Sit down, Mr. McDonald."

Jiya couldn't see the man's face, but the pause in his step suggested he was surprised. After a very long moment, he took his right hand out of his pocket to take his hat off, and sat down across from Lucy.

"What did you do with my messenger?" she asked.

"Boy ran off."

Lucy seemed to accept that. "You were invited here to hear a proposal on destroying Jane Addams and Hull House, weren't you?"

McDonald shot to his feet—

" _Sit. Down_."

McDonald froze. Then, slowly, he sat.

Wyatt shifted his weight subtly. Flynn eased his tongue over his upper lip. Both of them eyed Lucy. Jiya rolled her eyes. _Jeez, boys, could you be any more obvious?_

Since she was thinking with a _slightly_ more helpful percentage of her blood flow than they were, she was worried about Lucy's increasing pallor. Whatever Lucy was doing here, passing out in the middle wouldn't help.

"Yes or no?" Lucy added, in that same sharp, authoritative tone that Jiya had never heard before.

"... yes."

"The man who was going to make that proposal to you, Jeremiah Thorpe, is dead."

McDonald scoffed. "Like I'm going to believe that?"

"Recognize this?" Wyatt tossed a pocket watch on the desk.

McDonald frowned at it. "I don't know the man's watch on sight."

"Would you recognize his face?" Lucy asked. "Because his body is in the basement of the building across the street. Would you like to see it?"

McDonald opened his mouth, then closed it again. "What do you want from me?"

"I want you to leave Hull House and its residents alone."

"Its residents are damned pesky nuisances who the upper crust want hung from the nearest lamppost."

Lucy raised her eyebrows. "And you're prepared to do the upper crust's bidding?"

"Depends on how much they pay me."

One eyebrow arched higher. "That's not what I've heard. I've heard that Mike McDonald runs Chicago like a king, that _his_ money greases the wheels of the city machinery."

McDonald was silent.

"We both know you're a vicious man, Mr. McDonald. But do you really want to the arrange the deaths of a bunch of unarmed women in cold blood?"

"Came here to hear Thorpe's proposal," McDonald muttered after a minute. "Wasn't overly keen on the prospect, but there's always money in knowing what's happening." He looked at Lucy. "Fine. I'll leave those bee-bonneted idiots alone."

"And you'll convince the rest of the Chicago underworld to do the same."

"You ask too much." His sneer was audible. "Who the hell are you, anyway, lady?"

"I'm someone who just eliminated one of the most powerful men in the city." Lucy's voice and face were cold and composed. Jiya had the sudden feeling that this was the side of her that would've emerged had Rittenhouse successfully indoctrinated her.

 _That_ was a cheerful thought.

"The people who want Jane Addams dead don't think about Chicago like you do," Lucy continued. "You see a city built by immigrants and labor, a city where anyone can get ahead if they're sharp enough, make a buck if they're... unscrupulous enough. There's a sucker born every minute, right, Mr. McDonald?"

McDonald was silent, but Jiya could tell he was listening.

"But _they_ — they see a city where the patrician class has been wrongfully displaced. They want power, Mr. McDonald. They'll stop at nothing to get it. In a fight between Miss Addams and these people? You want Miss Addams to come out on top."

"You might be right. But that fight is not my fight."

"I'm not asking you to make it your fight. But we both know you run this city's criminal underworld. All I'm asking is that you keep it a fair fight. Is it _fair_ for someone to send enforcers against a bunch of women, no matter how aggravating you find them?"

"Something tells me you'd do all right."

"You're right. I would." Lucy paused, letting that sink in. "But Miss Addams is not me. And which _kind_ of woman, Mr. McDonald, do you want to prevail in this city?" Her voice held a threatening note.

McDonald, again, said nothing.

"You're a brutal man with a violent temper," Lucy said. Over McDonald's protest, she continued, "but a woman came to your gambling parlor with her baby, furious with you because her husband had gambled away all his wages, and you gave her a month of rent money and banned her husband from the place."

"I don't," McDonald said after a minute, sounding startled, "recall seeing you there that day."

"I know a lot about what happens in Chicago," Lucy said quietly. "And I know that _you_ know that people get dragged into trouble in this town who don't deserve it. Like that woman and her baby. Like Jane Addams and Hull House." She paused. "We disarmed two bombs there today."

" _Bombs?_ We don't need any more anarchist—"

"It wasn't anarchists. It was the people who had this business proposal for you."

After a minute, McDonald swore in a language Jiya didn't recognize. "Place is full of kids," he muttered.

"Yes," Lucy said steadily. "It is."

"If I do this," McDonald burst out a moment later, "I want something in return. I don't know who you are or _where_ you came from—" He sounded genuinely disturbed. "But you get out of my city. I don't ever want to see you here again."

"As long as you keep Jane Addams and Hull House safe, you have my word."

A long, long moment. "And you have mine," McDonald grumbled. He stood, approached the desk cautiously, and offered his hand. Lucy shook it. McDonald turned to go.

He paused at the door and looked back. "It wasn't Miss Addams they were after," he said. "Not only. The message specifically mentioned Miss Smith. You know, daughter of the paper king? I thought he might want to know."

He left. Lucy looked like she'd bitten into something nasty.

"Lucy?" Wyatt prompted. "Why would Emma go after Mary?"

"Because Mary provides emotional support for Jane for thirty years, that's why. It'd be like assassinating Eleanor to get FDR to leave politics early." Lucy stood and bit back a hiss. "Let's make sure he's gone, then get back to Hull House."

As they left, Jiya gave Lucy a sharp look, but Flynn was watching her equally sharply. Jiya figured if there was one subject on which Flynn could be trusted to be paranoidly vigilant, it was Lucy's well-being.

... and wasn't _that_ a strange thing to be thinking. But she was a scientist, and she had the evidence of her eyes.

Lucy's face was pinched with pain. Possibly trying to distract her, Flynn said, "I'm starting to, uh, see a pattern."

"What pattern?" Lucy asked.

"With these historical figures you most admire? Lucretia Mott, Jane Addams..."

"So? What pattern?"

"Tiny and fierce."

Lucy _looked_ at him. "What are you implying, Garcia?"

Wyatt snorted. "Look, Flynn." He pointed to a dark shape off to the side of the road. "It's what you just stepped in."

"Who says I'm implying anything?" Flynn protested.

Jiya rolled her eyes.

 

 

 

#

They stopped at Hull House to tell Jane and the others that the threat should be over. Lucy wanted to return the clothes she'd borrowed, but Julia insisted she keep them, because what she'd been wearing before was filthy.

The women of Hull House had many questions. Lucy let the others do most of the talking. Right before they left, though, she took Jane aside to warn her that Mary had been a specific target of the plot. "I think the danger is ended," Lucy said. "But she should know. Her family should know."

Jane looked troubled, but nodded once. "Thank you, Mrs. Thompkins. Will we see you at Hull House again?"

"No," Lucy admitted. "We're going back to where we came from, now, which is very far away. You won't see us."

Jane studied her. " _How_ far away?"

Tiny, fierce, awesome historical women might be the pattern in her life lately, but telling those women that she was from the future would definitely not be. "Very," Lucy repeated. Then she hesitated. "You know Jeremiah Thorpe, the financier?"

"I know _of_ him."

"Did he have any children?"

Jane looked puzzled. "What do you mean, _did?_ "

"... does he have any children."

Mary Smith, a Chicago native who'd grown up in the same social scene Mr. Thorpe inhabited, was consulted. "No," Mary said. "At least, if he does, he doesn't recognize them."

Lucy looked up just then to find Garcia's gaze fixed on them.

They returned to the Lifeboat. Emma was back in the present, thank God. The ride home again jarred her injured back, but she was distracted. As soon as they landed, she grabbed the nearest tablet.

She found the obituaries.

She looked up, and realized she didn't have to say a word. Garcia's lips tightened.

She did anyway: "I'm sorry, Garcia."

He pulled himself up the ladder. A few seconds later they heard the front door slam.

"... what did I miss?" Connor asked.

Jiya answered, sparing Lucy. "We shot the great-grandfather of the man who ordered Flynn and his family killed. But they're still dead."

"And now we don't even know who did it in this timeline," Lucy muttered.

Connor looked pained.

"Where's Agent Christopher?" Wyatt asked.

"She was called away shortly after you left."

Lucy pulled up a search engine and looked for Jane Addams and Hull House. Her shoulders slumped in relief when the search engine suggested very normal-looking, recognizable autocompletes before she'd even finished typing. Hull House was still well-known. The history of the labor movement went pretty much as she remembered. They'd done okay.

Connor ran his comparison program, and Lucy read through the changes more carefully. Sometimes it was hard to make sense of what was different. After 1850, they'd discovered that a different man had become sheriff of a small township outside of Boston, with persistent but localized effects down the timeline for several decades. She'd never figured out why.

Here, the changes were more predictable. Julia Lathrop was photographed in a slightly different dress. Lucy double-checked the old photo: yes, that was the dress she was wearing right now. In the old timeline, Mary Smith died of pneumonia after nursing Jane through a heart attack, and Jane died the next year. Here, Mary lived six years longer, and Jane, three.

Lucy smiled wistfully. She had no idea how their trip had accomplished that, but she was glad Jane and Mary had gotten a few more years together. Even after, what? thirty, forty years? the historical record put the beginning of their romantic relationship closer to 1900, but Lucy, having _seen_ them in 1892, was inclined to disagree— even after all that time, it wasn't enough. It was never enough.

Oh, God. Poor Garcia.

Lucy showered. Jiya patched up her back, which thankfully wasn't nearly as bad as last time. Garcia was still gone. The usual afternoon storm hadn't happened yet, but the clouds were looming, and the air was oppressively humid. Lucy made dinner, but none of them had much appetite.

She was exhausted and— jet-lagged? time-lagged?— but she didn't think she could sleep with Garcia still out there somewhere. Should she try to find him?

A few hours later, she heard heavy footsteps and their door banged open. He'd showered and changed, but one look at his face told her what mood he was in.

"Isn't it _strange_ that no matter what we do, I never get my family back?" Garcia bit out. "Not even when we wiped out most of Rittenhouse? Is it just _coincidence_ that the part that slaughtered them survives, _every time_?"

Lucy stared at him.

"Or is it that there's no universe in which they live and anyone but Rittenhouse has a time machine? And so we _can't_ come back to it?" His face contorted. "I don't go after Rittenhouse, none of this happens. You never come back from the future and make it happen."

"Garcia—"

He wheeled on her. "Do you think she knows? The Lucy from the future who gives me the journal? Well, we're having this conversation, so she will now, _right_?"

"Garcia, I'm not that woman." And might never be, depending on how the timelines had changed.

"I know that." His tone left her unsure whether he considered that a good thing. "When Jiya gets that thing working, I should go back to that poor fool in São Paulo, warn him that it never works. That they're never coming back. That my _family_ is the damned sacrificial animal."

"You can't—"

Those were rarely good words to say to him. And she hadn't even thought through the end of the statement. But she remembered very clearly him saying, _the only thing keeping me from killing myself was the idea of stopping these beasts who had done this thing._

He looked down at her. "I can't _what?_ Without them, without _winning_ , name one thing that man has to live for! One thing _I_ have to live for. Because your future self is so good at that! When there's, uh, something that matters to her on the line, I guess."

She was silent, stricken. Though _stopping Rittenhouse anyway_ was an accurate answer, it wasn't the one he wanted to hear right now.

" _One thing_ , Lucy."

She stood. "Garcia."

He wasn't even looking at her. "They're never coming back," he repeated softly.

His face contorted.

He fell to his knees like he'd been shot and hid his head in his hands. She knelt beside him. His shoulders shook as he folded forward. He gasped for air, crumpling to the ground.

Garcia did nothing by halves, including grief. He cried silently, but so hard she was afraid he'd be sick. She kept her hand between his shoulder blades. He made no sign of noticing. She wasn't sure he knew she was there. She had no right to see this. But the only thing more obscene than witnessing this would be leaving now.

He sobbed, and sobbed, shaking violently. When he made a really alarming choking noise, Lucy grabbed him, two hundred pounds of bereaved dead weight, and hauled him sideways. He toppled sideways and didn't seem to notice.

Disturbing as his rage was, even at its bitterest and most corrosive and directed at her, she would rather have had that than this. But maybe this was better for _him_ , though it was exquisitely painful to watch.

He cried so hard she half-expected the threatening storm to open up and join him. But it just continued to grow, the thunder drowning out most of the quiet noises Garcia did make. Watching him, Lucy felt her heart shatter and try to reassemble, over and over.

She wasn't strong enough to rock him like he had done for her, but she held him, tears running down her own face. How did he have anything left, even just considering sheer physical exhaustion?

Because he was Garcia, that was how.

Slowly, his shaking eased. His choked sobs tapered off.

When he was still, Lucy propped herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "Garcia?" she whispered.

He didn't respond, or move.

She smoothed his hair out of his eyes. His breathing had turned deep and slow. She thought he was asleep.

Soldier or not, he was forty-two. Sleeping on the floor like this wasn't a good idea. She couldn't even straighten his legs out, because they were right by the end of the bed. She definitely couldn't get him _into_ bed. But maybe...

She dragged her cot next to him. She grabbed his torso and tried to pick him up. It didn't work, but he also didn't wake up or react at all. He _was_ breathing, right?

She almost gave up and left him there, but she had the strange thought that one day his life might depend on her ability to move him to safety. She didn't like that thought, or the way it had come out of nowhere. So she strained to haul him halfway upright, then shoved forward until his torso toppled onto the cot. Then his legs, one at a time. His feet were hanging off the end. She couldn't do anything about that. He had a pillow, and it was too hot for a blanket.

She climbed gingerly into his bed, and moved _his_ pillow to the other end, so she could curl up and watch him.

At least he was asleep.

Her heart ached for him in a way crying wouldn't ease, but she didn't have the energy to stop herself. The thunder intensified. The beauty of the lightning was strangely comforting but she was too tired to appreciate it much.

Finally the rain came, sheeting down, and a cool breeze blew in through the window. She slept.

She woke sometime after dawn.

Garcia was still asleep, though he'd at least rolled over in the night. Lucy didn't think she'd sleep again. Maybe Jiya was downstairs already and could use some help. Maybe she could fire up the simulator and die again. If not...

If not, she'd been meaning to start looking for traces of Rittenhouse through history. She was a historian; why not make herself useful?

She crept around the cot, grabbed her clothes, and headed towards the bathroom, trying not to think or feel too much. The warm water helped. She dressed quickly and went back to the bedroom to check on—

The door was closed.

She'd left it open wide enough to slip through, because sometimes after the rain when the wood was particularly swollen and warped, it squeaked. Now it was definitely closed, and not just shoved halfway towards the latch, either.

It _was_ her room just as much as his. He'd made that clear, and she— actually believed him. But she stared at that door for a long moment. Then she wrenched herself away before— before _someone_ came along and found her staring like a psycho.

 _One thing, Lucy_.

The reply: _Well, Lucy, what did you expect? You're not the heroine of some romance for the ages. Did you honestly think you'd be enough for anyone?_

"Shut up, Mom," Lucy muttered.

She downed a tall glass of cold tea and forced herself to eat a protein bar, though she had no appetite. She grabbed her books, a stack of articles Denise had brought her, and her laptop, and set up camp in the rickety swing under the live oak out front.

Feeling like she'd put some distance between her and the house helped. So did knowing that she was facing away from their— from _all_ the front windows, and would have to look over her shoulder to see anything.

She worked steadily. Sometimes she thought that her academic success— limited as it was— came not from any particular brilliance or even work ethic but from the fact that, when misery hit, she could put her head down and focus on her work. She knew some of her colleagues couldn't concentrate in the face of tragedy or disruption, but for her, research had always been a refuge.

She worked, and worked, and worked. She didn't find anything, but she used her institutional access to download a bunch more articles. Sitting outside in the heat of a Florida summer wasn't the best idea she'd ever had, but at least she was in the shade, and the physical discomfort might distract her from the pain of remembering last night. At least, that was the theory. Really, it just made her cranky.

The day wore on. She heard Jiya and Connor calling back and forth about something in the cave. Their voices comforted her a little. She squeezed her eyes shut against the glare of the sun, and stopped for a brief breather. She was making good progress. Maybe it was a fool's errand, this search for clues, but they didn't have any _other_ clues. And just like Jiya and Connor were the experts in time travel and Lucy was extraneous there, Lucy was the expert in history.

 _I'm not sure I would say_ expert, _dear, you're very talented but—_

 _"_ Shut _up_ , Mom, _"_ Lucy muttered.

Between the heat and everything else, she had no appetite. She did go inside for another drink and to use the bathroom. She'd peed outside often, since this all began, but she preferred an actual seat and toilet paper, thank you very much.

Her bedroom door was still closed, and she didn't stop to look for anyone.

Halfway through the afternoon, she froze at a quiet footstep off to her side. Something— some _one_ — large moved in her peripheral vision. The swing creaked and shifted as a substantial weight burdened it.

She kept her head down for a few minutes, working, or pretending to. She waited for— well. She waited.

Finally, she looked up.

Garcia looked like hell warmed over. The sunglasses on top of his head had presumably been doing a better job of hiding the purple smudges under his eyes when they were on his face. He looked exhausted on a level that sleep could never touch. But that bitter rage was gone from his expression.

"My half-brother's alive now, but wasn't when I was growing up, obviously," he said quietly after a while. "My mother desperately wanted another child—" He gestured at himself awkwardly, and paused. "I learned early that it's not, uh, reasonable to ask another person to be your reason to live. Too much of a, uh." He touched his tongue to his top lip. "Burden."

He looked up at her. "It was a stupid thing to ask," he added. "I'm... sorry."

She dug the toes of her sneakers into the sandy soil and gently rocked them back and forth. "Did my future self promise you your family back?"

"Not stated or implied. You just talked about defeating Rittenhouse."

That made sense; would he have even believed future-her, if she'd promised him his family back?

"Rittenhouse gone, or my family alive...?" he continued eventually. A hint of the old anger crossed his face, but when it was gone, he looked sadder and more tired than ever.

"Lorena, and then Iris, they were my... second chance." He glanced over at her, and Lucy realized he was fidgeting with his wedding ring. "You read my file, Lucy. You know what I was before."

She nodded. "I do. A man who risked his life to rescue kids."

He didn't take her bait. "But if I went back to the beginning and undid all of this... Rittenhouse would always be hanging over our heads. Their heads." He looked down. "So, uh."

They were quiet for a while.

"I don't think you're going to be able to tell me that part," he said. "When you go back to give me the journal."

"What makes you think I still will?"

"Everything we do, we still come back to a timeline where there's reason to do what we just did. Otherwise we couldn't come back. Right?"

Lucy tried to think through that. Finally, she cut to the heart of the matter: "I don't want to lie to you, Garcia. That would be incredibly cruel."

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh?" He looked down at her. "You haven't so far. Future you, I mean. Technically, we've even taken down most of Rittenhouse, one way or another." He hesitated. "Whatever else, it's my fault Emma has a time machine, so..."

She looked up quickly, surprised. "So...?"

"We'll see this through," he said quietly. "Somehow."

"And after?"

He didn't respond.

"Garcia, what are you saying?"

Silence.

She got up and stood in front of him where he couldn't as easily look away. "Garcia."

He looked up at her, impassive.

She fumbled for words. "What would L—" Then stopped, because that was a monumentally stupid, not to mention insensitive, question.

"What would Lorena say to me?" Garcia guessed. He didn't seem angry about it, though that might've been simple emotional exhaustion. "She's dead, Lucy. I can't keep... listening for her voice." His own voice turned bleak.

Lucy folded her arms over her chest. "And what if your situations were reversed, and she felt like you do?"

That got a wince out of him. "I appreciate this impassioned defense," he said after a minute, with that same gentle, twisted smile. "But it's not necessary."

She studied him. "Really?"

"Really."

Slowly, she nodded. "Okay." She sat down beside him again. The swing creaked and rocked ominously.

"I've, uh... suspected for a while," he said after a while. "I just didn't know why."

She looked up at him. "I'm sorry."

He looked down at her. "You've lost just as much as me. You don't need my pain too."

No, she hadn't. Had she? Amy— Mom— Dad— she hadn't lost Dad to Rittenhouse, though. She'd found out he wasn't her sperm donor, but Henry Wallace was still her _father_.

"... was _he_ Rittenhouse?" she muttered, horrified.

"Who?"

"My father. My real father. No, if he were Rittenhouse, they wouldn't have had to tell my mother to sleep with— Cahill." She nodded, satisfied. "— unless he were some lesser Rittenhouse member and they wanted, wanted an _heir_ —" Gross. Grosser. "No, if he were Rittenhouse, they would have told me a lot sooner." She was satisfied again, except, oh God, what was her life?

"Don't worry about me," she added. "I'm... I'm okay."

He glanced at her, at her stack of books, and back to the house, but didn't say anything. Lucy didn't, either. If he had an observation to make, he could just go ahead and use words.

They rocked gently back and forth for a while, though did not actually swing, given that his legs were approximately three miles long and therefore it would take him some effort to keep them off the ground.

"Do you ever think they— she— would be angry with you for moving on?" he asked quietly.

"I've dreamt that Amy accuses me of forgetting her," she admitted. "Yes."

"And... what do you do?"

She took a deep breath. "I wake up, cry, and then remember that that's not the real Amy. The real Amy would want me to be— well, and happy. Because that's what I would want for her, in the same situation." She hesitated, swallowing hard. When she continued, her voice was choked. "I almost died in a car crash in college. If I had... of course I wouldn't have wanted her to dwell on it forever. I love her. She deserves so much more than that."

She wiped away the tears that had welled up in her eyes. She watched Garcia nod, slowly.

They sat without talking for a while, surrounded by the sounds of crickets, the creaking of the swing, and of distant clanking from the Batcave. Lucy wiggled her shoes in the dirt, and noticed another little cactus growing in the grass.

"So, how the hell'd you get me on that cot?"

Lucy looked up. "Sheer willpower?"

"You have a lot of that."

"I do."

"Lucy... thank you. For, uh, staying."

She nodded. "Always."

"It wasn't—"

Lucy heard a loud _thock,_ followed by sudden freefall, followed by a jolt, followed by sliding inexorably sideways, hitting something soft, and then falling forwards. The other sensations were confused enough that she wasn't sure how, exactly, she'd ended up on her side in the dirt, but she was definitely there.

She heard papers flutter down around her.

Her subconscious must have known what had happened, or perhaps noticed that Garcia wasn't panicking. She opened her eyes to see him in the ruins of the swing. Well, technically, the swing was intact, it was just... detached on one side.

He looked a little stunned. "Hurt?"

She shook her head.

He looked up at the overhanging bough dubiously. Lucy pulled her feet out of his side so he scramble get out from under it before it decided to do something... else. The bolt appeared to have come out of the bough cleanly, but she didn't think that crack in the limb had been there before.

He pushed himself out of the sideways swing and helped her sit up. Lucy brushed herself off, then more gingerly got the dirt out of her eye. She needed to rinse out her mouth, too. He was picking up her papers, but she didn't understand why he was putting them in piles like—

Her eyes widened. "They're out of order?"

He looked sideways at her. "Most people use staples for this, Lucy."

"It drives me crazy when my students give me stapled essays, I can't turn it over and—"

"Or paper clips."

"That's... also crazy. Everyone knows those are for breaking out of handcuffs."

He snorted, almost a real laugh. "I'll gather. You sort."

"You think this is what future me meant when she called us quite the team?" Lucy teased him after a minute.

He gave her a dry look, and just handed her another stack.

#

That night, she woke to Garcia's rough, choked breathing. He wasn't making any other sound. "Garcia?" she whispered.

"Didn't mean to wake you," he rasped.

That had to be the single most asinine thing she had ever heard the man say. She got up and stretched gingerly out on the edge of his bed. She tugged at his shoulder until, with a barely audible moan, he turned over. He was shaking, and in the moonlight through the window, his eyes were red.

She pulled him against her, gently cradling his head to her chest. With her other hand, she rubbed circles against his broad, muscled back. A few broken, quiet sobs escaped him, a few Croatian words, but they were safely muffled against her.

She squeezed her eyes shut against her own tears, which he didn't need. She pressed her lips to his hair, and let him cry himself out.

She woke in basically that same position, with his arm wrapped around her waist. He'd sprawled against her with the heavy limpness of a man sleeping deeply, but he was very sensitive; she didn't think she'd moved at all, but it was only a minute or two before she felt him stir. He carefully pulled away from her.

He looked every one of his years, and then some. He put his hand to his face, his eyes still closed. It was like watching someone try to start a car with a low battery. Except, you know, heartbreaking.

He breathed out, soft and slow, then pushed himself to a sitting position. Lucy started to get out of his way, but he shook his head. Words were apparently still beyond him.

Still, she pulled her legs up so he could swing his own over the edge of the bed. He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his hands over his face. The deep lines on his face looked chiseled out of solid rock.

How many times had he gone through this?

She sat up beside him. "Garcia, I'm so sorry," she whispered.

After a long moment, he said, "I never..." His voice was gravelly. He swallowed. "I mourned them," he said, face buried in his hands. "But."

She felt frightened for him. If he'd decided that Lorena and Iris were never coming back... had he lost everything that had driven him these last three years?

He opened his eyes, perhaps reaching a familiar detente with his pain, and looked her over. He still looked stricken, but there was a trace of his usual assessing look, too. "Thanks," he managed.

She shook her head. "You don't need to thank me."

He stared at her like he was too tired to look away. She leaned forward and put her arms around him. He was still for a moment, but not tense. Then, carefully, he put one large hand at the back of her neck and the other at the small of her back.

She could feel his weariness in his posture, in every line of his body, in his breathing.

"Hope," he rasped softly, near her ear. "Humanity. And now... companionship." He took a breath. "I would tell you you have no idea what that means to me, but you see right through me, Lucy. So maybe you do."

She pulled back so she could stare at him, startled.

He watched her patiently. He definitely didn't have the energy for concealment. Not now.

"I usually feel pretty useless," she admitted. They were all hurting so badly, and what she could do felt like trying to plug a leaking dam with a potato.

That, of all things, got a hint of a smile out of him. A small, wry one. "Because you think you have to leap tall buildings in one jump and save the world three times before breakfast."

 _That_ struck uncomfortably close to home, though she was very, _very_ grateful he hadn't said, _because you think you have to be your mother_.

"... Maybe that's enough seeing through each other for the day," she muttered.

He snorted softly, stood carefully, and went to the dresser. He leaned his arms on the top for a moment. "When I left... our house for the... last time, I couldn't take much." He looked down. "Most of that's gone now. I have a few things, uh, tucked away." He opened the top drawer, hesitated, and handed her a picture.

It was a grainy print from a greyscale printer, and looked like a scan of a physical picture. She hoped the original was one of the things he had tucked away. On the left, sitting down, was a beautiful woman Lucy recognized from his file: Lorena. She looked exhausted, but she was beaming down at the bundled-up infant in her arms. Leaning above, one arm across the back of Lorena's chair, and looking down at them both like the sun rose and set on them, was a much younger-looking Garcia. Lucy didn't think either of them had had any idea the camera was there.

No, not just _younger_. Lucy glanced from the picture to the man leaning against the dresser, head bowed, and her heart ached. Garcia now looked so much less grim than when she'd first met him. But compared to his self in the picture, there was a deep sorrow etched into his features that would never be absent again.

"You look very happy," she said softly.

He swallowed. "Yes."

She tried to lighten the mood. "And, um... tired."

"Iris never slept much," he said after a minute. "Those first months were the worst. Sometimes I wondered if she was an advance alien scout sent to test the limits of human endurance. Before the invasion."

Lucy laughed out loud, and got an answering crinkle around his eyes.

Watching him stand there in his pajamas, hair disheveled, that brief flash of mirth fading into fatigue and aching sadness, the revelation struck her that neither friendship nor lust completely described what she felt about him.

_Oh God._

... he was hurting, and she wanted so badly to fix it for him. Was— was that all?

Hesitantly, she held out the picture. He took his time tucking it away again.

"Thank you for showing me," she said quietly.

He nodded once.

Her head spun. Maybe that was her heart. But— last night, the night before that... none of that was an intimacy she'd ever expected to have with this man. _Whatever_ word she put to what she was feeling right now, none of them would change that it had happened, and she did not want them to. If he needed it again, if one day it was her turn again, she wanted it to happen again.

She couldn't figure out if that answered her question, or made it irrelevant.

#

Emma jumped back to a completely nondescript day in 1824, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. They never saw her. When they finally checked the Lifeboat, found she was back in the present, and came back themselves, nothing had changed.

Lucy showered, walked into their bedroom, and saw two glasses and a full bottle of vodka on the dresser. She looked from it to Garcia.

"I will trade you," he said slowly, "one memory of Lorena and Iris for each memory of Amy." He paused, watching her face carefully. "If you... want that."

Her confusion dissolved into a somber feeling of too much understanding. Yes— yes, she did want that.

But this was a wake. And wakes were for the dead.

Judging by his own expression, she didn't need to say any of that out loud to him. He understood perfectly well— even he, who'd told her in a car in 1936 that as long as they kept hoping, they'd see their families again.

Slowly, she nodded.

Later, she didn't remember much of the night. She remembered telling him about Amy's passion, her creativity, her being completely unimpressed by most of the things Mom held dear. She told him about comforting Amy after her first boyfriend dumped her, about trips to the beach, about holding Amy's hair back when she was sick, about late nights as kids whispering together in bed and trying to be too quiet to be caught. She told him about their infrequent fights, usually prompted by Amy thinking Lucy should step out of Mom's shadow.

He told her about meeting Lorena for the first time, about their six-day breakup, about choosing Iris's name. He told her about the time Iris had emptied every cereal box they'd owned onto the kitchen floor so she could take a bath in it. He told her about he and Lorena lying awake at night, planning their future together.

As the night wore on and the level in the bottle dropped, they sat closer together and the memories got darker. "Twenty years ago," Lucy managed, "I was home alone with Amy, watching her, and the radio..." She took a healthy drink. "The radio told us there was a predator on the loose in our neighborhood. A human one."

She stared down at the floor, remembering. "I made Amy hide in Mom and Dad's big closet, and I sat in front of the door with the biggest knife I could find in the kitchen. It felt like we were there for hours."

"I could see into the backyard. A man... came up to the back door. He must've looked inside. I thought... I really thought I'd have to fight for Amy. And I..."

She stared at the floor. A minute passed, long and quiet. Another minute.

"... I was going to," she finished. "As long as she was okay, that would've been enough."

"He left. Mom and Dad came home not too long after that. I never saw the man again. They captured the escaped convict not far away. This was in the days before the Internet, so I never saw a picture of him. I never knew if it was the same man."

Silence. Another drink. Another.

"After I escaped," he said slowly, "Rittenhouse... had to discredit me."

He took a long drink.

"They framed me for the murder. They planted evidence that I'd— that I was—" His voice broke. "Lucy, it was _filthy_."

She looked up at him, put her hand on his shoulder, then cupped his cheek. At least her memories of Amy were untainted by that kind of shadow. At least... at least...

The room was spinning...

#

She woke to, possibly because of, a raging headache. "I've got to stop sleeping with you," she muttered.

Sprawled against Garcia as she was, she felt more than heard his choke of laughter.

"You know what I mean," she added.

He shifted beside her. "Morning, Lucy."

"Mmm." She should move. But she didn't want to move. He was comfortable, and comforting, and he smelled really nice, and— "Oh, God, did I say that out loud?"

"Yes."

"Oh my God, I am so sorry, I didn't mean—" Pause. Wait. Think. "... I did _not!_ "

She felt him laughing in earnest now. Outrage gave her the strength to sit all the way up, despite her headache, and not even fall over at the end. She stared down at him. She yanked his pillow out from under his head and smacked him in the face with it.

He started laughing out loud, only putting up one hand to half-assedly fend off her attack. Had she ever _heard_ him laugh? In earnest, not bitter or sarcastic? He deserved this kind of happiness all the time, and if she had to keep beating him with a pillow to achieve that, well, she could do that.

Her headache spiked. She dropped the pillow on his stomach and grabbed her head. "Ah!"

He regarded her thoughtfully. "Instant karma's gonna get you, Lucy." Then he sat up, too, reached around her, and handed her the painkillers and his water glass.

"Thanks," she muttered.

He watched her for another moment. Then his face quirked into an adorable smirk. "So, Lucy, what were you thinking about me that was so horrifying?"

"Who said it was about you?" The pain faded a bit, just the natural ebb and flow of the headache. "God. I've gotta stop _drinking_ with you, anyway."

She looked up, and studied him as his own smile faded. He was tired. He was in pain. But the anger from— two, three?— nights ago was absent, as was the incalculable grief from the morning he'd showed her the picture of his family.

He was here, in both senses of the word. And she was here. They'd start from there.

She remembered her revelation of that same morning perfectly well. She still didn't know what to do with it. But she continued to have the feeling that any word she used was almost irrelevant.

What were they, anyway? Something in addition to friends and roommates, she was almost certain. Different from lovers. Not co-dependent, thank you very much.

 _Trusted_ , was perhaps the word.

But was that all?

Cautiously, she reached up, took his hand in hers, and held them both near her leg.

She took another drink with her free hand. Details of the night were starting to come back. "... did I tell you I hated you?"

"You... said you had hated me. After I made your sister disappear."

"Mmm." She couldn't deny that. "I did also tell you I _stopped_ hating you a long time ago, right?"

His hand tightened around hers for a moment. "Lucy, I'm... sorry," he said very quietly.

She tightened her own grip. "I know." It wasn't okay, because nothing about Amy being gone could _be_ okay. But.

She let go of his hand and looked at the half empty bottle of vodka. "It still— hurts," she said quietly. "But not like— it's infected?"

He swallowed. "Good." He hesitated. "I— enjoyed— talking. About. Them. To you." The words came out like someone was pulling them stubbornly out of him.

Her lips quirked. "You know you don't have to get either of us drunk to do that, right?"

He nodded, but didn't look up.

After a minute, she stood. "I assume you want that repulsive hot drink you're so fond of?"

"Please."

She hesitated at the door. She heard someone on the stairs— Wyatt, by the sound of it— and if she waited a moment, well, he didn't have to see her coming out of Garcia's room and she didn't have to see his expression. But more importantly—

Her head and her liver weren't particularly appreciative. But for the rest of her... "Thank you," she said quietly.

#

Jiya was never really sure what even started the fight.

She lay flat in the Pocket, staring at the equations. Objectively, she knew she was making progress. But it felt like chasing mountains on the horizon. The more forward progress she made, the more she discovered she'd underestimated the distance and the size of the obstacles in her path.

She was also trying to block out Wyatt's and Flynn's voices below as they got louder and sharper.

She knew now that it was _possible_. That saved her some nights of soul-devouring existential despair. But in its place she felt an overwhelming frustration with her own shortcomings.

She'd get it. She would. Figuring out that she was building on the work of an alternate version of herself was strangely... comforting.

Oh, God, if those idiots came to blows again, she might kill them herself—

Then the tension in the room eased a bit, and she relaxed.

"Right," Wyatt said, voice too dry to be as genial as it sounded. "But if _you_ got _your_ wife back, you'd never look at Lucy again."

Jiya sat up fast. Flynn was staring with a poleaxed look. Wyatt smirked at him, not a particularly friendly expression, and sauntered towards the barn ladder.

Slowly, Flynn collected himself. He glanced up, a sardonic look forming on his face, apparently having guessed she was there—

But his gaze never made it to her. He looked horrified.

Jiya looked where he was looking. From this angle she could barely see Lucy at the top of the house ladder, eyes wide.

They all stood frozen for a minute. Then Lucy dropped the trapdoor closed. Flynn muttered softly, and bolted up the ladder after her. But Jiya heard the front door slam before he reached the top.

Jiya closed her eyes briefly, mouth tight. Then she grabbed her stuff, slid down the rope, and climbed the other ladder.

She found Wyatt frowning at something in the makeshift machine shop. She crossed her arms over her chest. "You idiot."

He looked up fast. "What—"

"Lucy _heard_ you."

He looked startled, then serious.

She didn't give him a chance to speak. "You maybe just wrecked her support system, and God knows she _needs_ one, for the sake of a cheap shot at Flynn. _Great_ job, Wyatt."

He opened his mouth. "I'll talk to her—"

" _I'll_ talk to her." She was so damn tired of all this, and it wasn't her job to clean up after Flynn and Wyatt. But Lucy was her friend. "You've done _plenty_."

She got a cold drink, drank it slowly, then checked the house for Lucy in case she'd come back. When she didn't see her, Jiya headed for the creek.

Her intuition was right: she found Lucy sitting on the big rock, staring at the water. Lucy spoke without turning her head: "I am so _sick_ of you—"

"Uh, hi," Jiya said.

Lucy looked up. "Oh," she said. "... sorry. Hi."

Jiya sat beside her.

"I'm sorry you got dragged into this," Lucy added.

"You... don't need to apologize for Flynn and Wyatt."

They stared at the clear spring water mixing into the dark, tea-like creek. There was probably a metaphor there, but Jiya was too tired to articulate it. Where the spring water flowed into it, the creek's visibility increased, revealing little fishing darting through the shallows, turtles paddling through the gentle current— and near the far bank, a small alligator drifting idly, watching the lunch buffet.

"So, um." Jiya spotted a heron watching the water, motionless, upstream. "What Wyatt said..."

Bothered Lucy, obviously. Or else she wouldn't be out here.

Which— Jiya found it a little hard to follow, and a little hard to swallow. This was _Flynn_ they were talking about. But while Jiya had no idea what his and Lucy's Thing was, the existence of the Thing was not news.

To her, Flynn would probably always be the guy who'd had Rufus shot. But slowly, her brain had insisted on adding other hashtags: "Loyal." "Hates Rittenhouse." "Saved your life." Etc.

She didn't think any of them had known what to expect when Flynn had moved in. But the better she got to know him, the more she saw how the war had fucked him up.

Lucy gave her a quick, defensive, sideways glance.

"Hey," Jiya said. "I told you, no judgement. I don't get it, but... I, you know. See. It."

After a minute, Lucy nodded. "I just—" She didn't finish that thought.

"It's not like our coping skills are exactly calibrated for a world in which death might not be permanent," Jiya offered.

Lucy looked up at her. "We'll get him back," she said quietly. " _You'll_ get him back."

"Yeah," Jiya said, equally soft. "I know."

Lucy looked down at her hands. Ever since Rufus and Wyatt had helped Lucy escape Rittenhouse, Jiya had gotten experience in distinguishing between Baseline Lucy Sad and Something Else Sad. Three years in Chinatown had dulled those skills, but they'd come _right_ back in the days... after.

"You wanna talk about anything?" she asked gently.

"I don't think my sister is ever coming back."

... _oh_. Awkwardly, Jiya leaned forward and put her arms around Lucy's shoulders. She wasn't much of a hugger, but Lucy was.

She knew she'd made the right choice when Lucy sighed and leaned against Jiya for a minute. "Thanks," Lucy whispered.

They sat back. Lucy didn't say anything more. And Jiya knew her. "... would you actually prefer I not be here?"

"Ummm," Lucy said.

Jiya smiled. "It's okay. You're not going to hurt my feelings."

Lucy gave her a grateful look.

"Do you want me to send either of those idiots out to grovel?"

Lucy shook her head.

"Okay." Jiya stood. "And— hey. If you ever need it, the offer of my bedroom is still open."

Lucy smiled wanly and thanked her again. Jiya left.

#

Lucy stared at the sunlight in the water as Jiya's steps receded.

She felt sick.

She wanted to blame it on time travel screwing up their personal lives so badly, but this was probably just _her_ . She needed to stop falling for widowers trying to get their wives back. Not that _falling for_ really described what she felt about Garcia, but the point stood.

She remembered him telling her in 1780 that if he ever managed to bring Lorena and Iris back, he would walk away from them. And his wild grief, as the possibility of them never coming back sank in on some visceral level it hadn't touched before, was vivid and fresh in her memory. But...

But the look on his face when Wyatt had taunted him. God, the taunt itself— but it was Garcia's expression that kept coming back to her. Like a man caught in a vise grip. Like he'd never even considered...

It was not the look of a man who was positive he'd never be in that situation. Or confident in his reaction if he were.

When Wyatt had been torn between her and Jessica, when Jessica had wanted to walk away outside that hospital, it had taken nearly everything Lucy had to resist the easy, seductive path of inaction. She wasn't sure she had it in her to send Garcia away, too.

She wouldn't have to, though, would she? He'd choose Lorena, and Iris. As he should.

She felt a fresh stab of frustration with Wyatt. He _was_ doing so much better lately, and she was glad. It made it easier on the rest of them, but more importantly, she'd hated seeing him in the pain he was in. But he still— nobody was perfect, and in the moments when he succumbed to temptation and snapped at Garcia, he could do a lot of damage.

She still didn't, _couldn't_ , regret their night in 1941, though it hurt to remember how happy she'd been. Everything had seemed so simple. Two unattached people who'd danced around this for a while, appreciating each other, pleasing each other, having a good time together that they hoped would lead to a lot more.

But if someone had offered her the choice between how things had actually happened between her and Wyatt, and an alternate timeline when they just stayed "open to the possibilities," they never got together, and their friendship stayed perfectly intact rather than being stretched and injured and having to oh-so-slowly knit itself back together, it would be hard to make that decision now.

She wasn't sure how long she'd sat there, watching the fish and swatting the mosquitoes away, when she heard someone coming down the path. Someone large, moving quietly.

Garcia stopped behind her. "May I, uh, join you?" he asked hesitantly.

Lucy shifted over to make room.

He sat beside her and seemed to study her face for a moment. "Lucy..."

She suddenly couldn't bear to hear the end of that sentence. "We both know what's happening, we're adults." She'd... known for quite a while she was special to him in some way. She'd known ever since that morning in the barn that he found her attractive, though it'd been much easier to ignore that as a fluke. She certainly recognized how _she_ felt about him.

She glanced at him, and saw neither surprise nor denial in his expression.

After everything that had happened the last few nights, she hesitated to irritate this wound. But him starting to accept that Iris and Lorena might never come back was not at all the same thing as Iris and Lorena _actually_ never coming back. "But you deserve to have Lorena and Iris back. And I—" She hesitated again. "I deserve not to be second-best to another resurrected wife."

His face relaxed, for a moment, into a weird mix of tenderness and... _pride_? No, that couldn't be it. "I don't deserve them or..." He hesitated, and looked down at his hands. "You. But that's—"

"I told you in 1780, you're wrong."

"And then I tried to do the very thing you said would push me past the point of no return."

"I'm not interested in re-litigating this," she told him. "But you know my opinion."

He looked at her, a little fond, a little exasperated. He seemed to sense, as she did, that they'd reached an impasse. It would not be circumvented just by repeating themselves.

"You were the one who told me not to give up hope," she added.

"Lucy—" He stopped himself quickly, and exhaled. "You're right. About that. I did. And we shouldn't, even if..."

The memories of their last few nights came vividly into her mind.

"But even if you were right about _me_ , I'm not the man they knew any more. Lucy, he's gone. I— I _killed him_. For them."

She looked at him, feeling the weight of that, not daring, right now, to reach her hand out and comfort him.

"Lucy—" He hesitated. "I'm not trying to—" He glanced at her, and didn't finish that thought. "I just want you to have all the information."

For a minute, neither of them spoke.

"Does anything have to change?" she asked quietly. She felt a little cowardly. "I mean— do you want me to move out?"

He glanced at her from under hooded lids, and touched his tongue to his top lip. "I told you, Lucy. I'll tell you if I ever want you to go." He paused. "If _you_ want— or need— to, uh... I'll take the couch."

She just looked at him for a minute. Then she glanced at the heron as it took flight, startling a bunch of other birds out of the bushes. "You feet would hang off the end."

"Run!"

She stared at him. "What?"

"RUN!" He lifted her bodily and threw her up the path towards the house, drawing his gun with his other hand.

She landed— stumbled— recovered— looked—

As the first shots sounded, she fled from the figures advancing through the scrub.

Garcia— she was leaving Garcia behind— but without a weapon, she was a liability.

She sprinted towards the house. She stayed low and near the trees, expecting a bullet every second. Behind her— oh, God, that was so many shots, was he already dead?

Halfway to the house Wyatt hurtled past her, his own gun drawn. "Go!" he shouted over his shoulder, and then she heard him start firing, too.

She almost collided with Jiya outside the barn. "You're our only pilot." Lucy bodily blocked her path and grabbed her shoulders. "If they get you or the Lifeboat, it's over. Take Connor and jump. I'll help the guys hold them off." She grabbed a gun from Jiya, who'd raided Garcia's stash, by the looks of it.

Jiya stared at her hard for a long second, then nodded once and sprinted for the house.

Lucy ducked into the bushes, staying low and getting her bearings.

The gunshots were more sporadic now. Why? Were Garcia and Wyatt— Or was everyone in the limited visibility of the scrub? But Wyatt and Garcia couldn't stop the number of people she'd seen, which meant—

A head came into view, a man in a helmet and vest running up the path. Lucy leaned out and shot him between the eyes. She ducked clumsily to the ground as return bullets came far too close. This scrub was a death trap, you couldn't go anywhere in it without making the fronds move conspicuously.

 _Oh God, please let us all get through this alive_ , she prayed.

She stayed as low as she could, wriggling through the brush. The saw palmettos sliced into her hands and arms and face. She lost her balance and put her hand in a hole, only to yank it out when a miniature dinosaur head snapped at her fingers. She scooted away from the tortoise burrow, stopped, and listened.

The shots were coming closer. Getting closer to the house. Had Jiya and Connor escaped?

She climbed to her feet behind an oak tree. There, up ahead— she shot two people in helmets and vests. They fell to the ground. Were they dead? Should she go check?

She approached cautiously, and recoiled when she got closer. Yes, they were very dead. She'd killed them.

She stayed low and moved towards the creek. How many of them were there? Where were the others?

In the clearing by the river—

Garcia was on the ground. Emma stood over him with a gun.

Lucy stood up and fired. Emma stumbled— Garcia's arm moved— Emma fell.

A soldier looked Lucy's way. She dove into the scrub before he could shoot her. She swallowed a shriek as bullets hit the ground all around her— she wriggled into the sandy soil behind a sideways palmetto trunk—

A louder blast. The bullets stopped. When she poked her head up, he was gone.

She passed his body. So much blood. More than she would've expected. The gunshots were tapping off. In the clearing—

She saw a dark figure crumpled on the ground. Her stomach dropped. She started to run. _No PLEASE_ —

A soldier lunged out of the bushes and grabbed the figure. Then Lucy noticed its relative size, and the red hair. Emma— and not dead— Lucy opened fire—

The soldier fled towards the creek and out of sight. At least two others followed. Where was Garcia? Where was _Wyatt?_

More retreating soldiers. Had they been driven off or had they done whatever they'd come to do?

Another shot, really loud and close. She peered through the trees—

_What?_

A sunburnt white man with long grey hair and a long white beard stood in a clearing, firing a shotgun at the escaping soldiers. He spun at Lucy's approach, gun aimed right at her. Then he frowned, and lowered the gun— partway.

Lucy didn't lower hers. "Who're you?"

"I'm your neighbor. I brought you the zucchini."

Lucy stared at him.

"Your friend borrowed my truck to take your trash to the dump?"

Lucy lowered her gun.

"Didn't think this sounded much like target practice, so I came to check on y'all. Saw them shooting at your friend. Had him outnumbered five to one." He looked grim. "A government raid, was it?"

"They're a—" She glanced at the Gadsden flag on his overalls, and stopped herself before she revealed that, technically, _they_ were with the government. "It's complicated. Thank you. For helping us. Are— are they gone?"

"Looks like it."

"I need to find my friends." She plunged into the scrub. It sliced up her arms and legs. She came out near the creek where the trail was littered with bodies. All in battle gear, none—

Something moved in the bushes. Lucy aimed—

"Garcia!" She dropped to her knees beside him.

His face was grim, and tight with pain. He didn't try to get up. "You hurt?" he rasped.

She shook her head. "They're gone."

"I know. We have to—" He grimaced. "Get out of here."

She looked down. One leg of his jeans was dark with blood. The bullet must've missed major blood vessels, but—

She heard someone behind her, but it was only their neighbor. "I c'n bring my truck around to the road, we can load him in it and take 'im to the hospital that way. I don't think he's gonna be walking soon."

"I— are you—" She needed to make sure Garcia wasn't about to die, she needed to call Agent Christopher, she needed to check the house and the cave— she needed to find _Wyatt_.

Garcia tried to push himself up. Their neighbor pushed him right back down. "Oh, no you don't, son—"

Garcia glared at him with such vehemence Lucy thought they might have another body on their hands. But she had bigger worries. She snatched Garcia's phone from his pocket, gave their neighbor a terse "look after him," dialed Agent Christopher, and ran up the path.

Denise picked up on the second ring. "Yes?"

"Rittenhouse just attacked."

She barely had the words out before Denise said, "I'm on my way."

She said more, but Lucy was suddenly distracted. Those shoes sticking out of the scrub, she _knew_ those shoes—

Oh God.

All she registered at first was that Wyatt was semi-upright and appeared intact. His hands and arms were bloody, but it didn't look like his.

Then she noticed what he was holding.

Or rather, who.

"Flynn _shot_ her," Wyatt managed, voice cracking

"Lucy!" Denise was saying. "Is anyone _hurt?_ "

"Um," Lucy said. "Yes. Yes."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes on history and my interpretation of canon:
> 
> Yes, we’re pretending there are public baths in Zagreb.
> 
> “Standing orders not to hurt you” is my take on that part from the pilot script that didn’t make it into the actual episode, that Lucy references.
> 
> I’m aware that a large part of the fandom interprets 1.07 as Flynn's attempt to kill the Team. I understand that viewpoint, but I disagree. If we know anything about Flynn, we know that he’s extremely smart and very tactically skilled. His plan in 1.07 is unnecessarily byzantine if his end goal is simply a dead Team; he could accomplish that without risking his crew and the Mothership— and, therefore, his ability to take down Rittenhouse.
> 
> Also, it makes more sense in the arc of the season if targeting Rufus for death in 1.15— the end of the season, when we see Flynn worn down and desperate in a way he wasn’t before— was his first attempt to kill either the “civilians” on the team.
> 
> All the named characters introduced in this chapter are real except Jeremiah Thorpe. Originally I set this in 1889, the day Hull House opened, which was frankly easier. But then I read James Weber Linn’s biography of Jane Addams. She was his aunt, so it’s perhaps tinged with hagiography, but when I got to the chapter on some of the other residents of Hull House— well, to quote Lois McMaster Bujold, “these people were _palpable_.” Mr. Linn’s deep respect for and admiration of them shone off the page, and reading more about them, I could see why. And I knew I had to include them somehow.
> 
> “There’s a sucker born every minute” was attributed to Mike McDonald. The story about the woman with the profligate gambler husband is, if not true, historical. He may have acted out of genuine feeling. He may have considered it good marketing. We’ll never know. He reputedly had something of a sense of fairness, for a crook, but he also really did have a violent temper.
> 
> Flynn being 42: the show makes more sense to me if S1 takes place over about a semester, and the same for S2. So this puts them in the summer of 2017.
> 
> Finally, Lucy slept on the outer side of the bed this time. She’s learning.


	7. For N in Falls: Rise N+1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: this chapter discusses (but does not portray, on or off-screen) historical lynchings. It also discusses lynching threats.

Lucy held out a paper cup of coffee to Wyatt.

He didn't take it. Or look up. Or react at all. He sat, arms resting on his thighs, staring at the floor, but she was certain he didn't actually see it.

After a minute, she put it down by his foot. Then she noticed the last cup of coffee she'd brought him, sitting there, cold and completely untouched.

She sat down beside him.

It was a good two minutes before he whispered, "I don't want her to _die_."

He sounded so confused, and bewildered, and guilty, that Lucy's heart cracked a little. "Wyatt, look at me," she said softly.

He did, slowly. He looked so lost. That crack widened.

Lucy put her arms around him and pulled him close, holding on tight. He exhaled, shuddered, and sniffled. She didn't let go until he did.

"I just—" His voice was a little stuffy. "I need to know if any of it was real."

_What do you want me to tell you, Lucy? Congratulations, you're human?_ She could be a hell of a lot more tactful than Garcia about it. Some days a pineapple could be more tactful than Garcia.

"You know, Jiya once told me that our coping skills aren't adapted to a world in which death isn't permanent," she said softly. "Wyatt, of course you don't want her to die. She may not be  _your_ Jessica, but she has a lot in common with her." She paused to see if any of this was sinking in.

"After everything she did—"

"Don't beat yourself up, Wyatt. Death— it may be a part of this business, of  _our_ business—" And  _our_ was accurate now. "But that doesn't mean we have to be excited about it."

Yet Lucy wanted Emma dead. Did that make her a hypocrite? But based on what they knew, Jessica was nowhere near as vicious, lethal, or as  _responsible_ as Emma.  _If_ she'd told the truth about her childhood to Wyatt, she might even be a Rittenhouse victim herself. Both victim and accomplice.

"And then there's— the baby," she added quietly. Jessica was visibly pregnant, which had startled the hell out of all of them. "Of course you don't want it to die either."

"I doubt it's mine," he muttered. He glanced up. "I mean, they went to the trouble of bringing her back to fuck with my head and with the team. You think they wouldn't— arrange  _that_ ?"

"I'm not the person to argue with you about Rittenhouse-arranged pregnancies," Lucy sighed.

Wyatt winced, acknowledging this.

They sat in silence for a minute. "Any sign of the others?" he asked.

Lucy had to shake her head. They'd found two dead Rittenhouse agents in the Batcave. The Lifeboat had been gone. No sign of Jiya or Connor. The tracking equipment had been unplugged, and they'd had to evacuate before they could set it up again.

Had Jiya and Connor escaped in the Lifeboat and pulled the plug on the tracking monitor so Rittenhouse couldn't chase them? Or... had Rittenhouse forced Jiya to pilot the Lifeboat at gunpoint again?

They had no way of knowing. If it was the second one, how could they help Jiya and Connor escape? Lucy had been racking her brains for a solution, but her thoughts didn't seem to want to settle. She just kept remembering the gunshots, the blood, the panicked fighting.

Blood. Wyatt was still wearing Jessica's. "You know you can go clean up at the hotel room, right? You might feel better."

"What hotel room?"

"Denise got us a room across the street. She posted guards." Lucy had been present when Denise told Wyatt this, but she wasn't surprised it hadn't sunk in. "Here." She dug her keycard out of her pocket and handed it to him. She could get another from Denise.

"Thanks." Wyatt took it, still staring into space.

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

"I feel so guilty thinking about her after what she did," he said finally. "It— feels like I'm betraying Rufus."

"You're not betraying Rufus, Wyatt," Lucy sighed. "Look, have you ever heard of the study where they asked people not to think about white bears, and the people who were asked not to think about white bears thought about them the most?"

He gave her a bewildered look.

"My point is, trying not to think about something just makes you think about it more. It's normal human psychology, Wyatt."

"You use all those big words, Professor, but all I hear is—" He stopped, and shook his head.

"Wyatt..." She sighed. Again.

After a minute, she said, "I can't forgive you for that, Wyatt. Not because it's unforgivable, but because I'm not the one you feel guilty about. But Rufus can. And we need you to stop beating yourself up if we're going to get him back."

He was completely still for a minute. Then he nodded, and breathed out slowly. "Yeah," he said. "You're right."

He didn't want to seem to talk after that. So after a few more minutes, Lucy said, "I'm going to go check with Denise."

See if they had any leads on Jiya and Connor— or a new base— or on figuring out how the hell Rittenhouse had found them— or any of the other urgent questions they had to consider.

She went upstairs, but Denise wasn't there. So Lucy sat outside Garcia's room and faced all the trouble they were in.

Garcia wouldn't be fighting for weeks, if not months. This time, he'd needed proper medical treatment. He'd needed  _blood_ . They'd had to bring him here, though it was Denise's career and freedom and probably Garcia's life if the wrong person found out.

They didn't know how Emma had tracked them down. Her agents could be closing on on the hospital even now. Denise's own agents were guarding the house, now, as others went over the scene, gathered forensic evidence, checked for booby traps, and packed everything up. She also had people stationed at the hospital entrances and exits. But if anyone could find a way, it was Rittenhouse.

Wyatt was... well. They all, she thought, with hysteria, because it was all she had left, needed so much therapy.

And there was no sign of Jiya, Connor, or the Lifeboat.

Denise came out of Garcia's room. Lucy straightened up. "I didn't know he could have—"

"He can't. I needed to speak to the doctor in private."

Lucy slumped back against the wall as a silver-haired, brown-skinned man in a white coat emerged from the same room and headed down the hall. "How is he?"

"He has a long recovery ahead of him, but he'll be all right." She looked less worried now than she had at any time since the attack. "You can probably go see him when he wakes up."

Denise kept her company for several quiet moments before Lucy said, "I just can't stop thinking of— everything we've lost."

"Nothing we can't come back from," Denise said firmly. "I'm waiting on a call about a new base, the agents are packing up the old one, and Flynn will be all right." She put a hand on Lucy's shoulder.

Which was sweet, but Garcia wasn't actually Lucy's biggest worry. "What if they have the Lifeboat?"

"I don't think they do. You know what Jiya's capable of."

Lucy nodded mechanically.

"She wouldn't let herself get taken without leaving a sign, and if she did, she'd have a way to fight back."

But the last time Jiya had had to fight her way out of Rittenhouse captivity, she'd gotten stranded in the 1880s, and Rufus had died trying to get her back.

Rufus. Lucy knew her memories of him were losing their vividness. That should've broken her heart, but it had to take a number and get in line.

"What did they even want with us?" she muttered. "Emma could have gotten 3 times that number and stormed the place."

Denise hesitated. "I'm not so sure. With your grandfather's help, we did a lot of damage to them. Then Wyatt forced them to abandon their headquarters, and  _then_ Emma killed most of their remaining leadership. She couldn't recruit people that quickly, surely."

"I've learned not to underestimate her," Lucy muttered. "I know I hit her. One of the soldiers carried her away. If you have any leads on their location... right now, they might be nearly as weak as we are."

"I'll pass that along. Last we knew, the Mothership was still in New York..."

"... and all the equipment that could track it  _or_ the Lifeboat is being packed up, and even if it weren't, there's no one left to work it," Lucy finished.

Denise looked away, lips thinning. "Pretty much."

They were quiet for a while. Lucy rested her elbows on her knees and stared at the floor tiles, with their inoffensive pattern of random beige flecks overlaid with the dirt and cart tire skid marks of heavy wear.

_I wish this were over_ , she'd told Wyatt. Now it was worse. Seeing what this war was doing to the people she cared about most, she wished anew that she'd taken out the Mothership in 1918. Or— even— let Garcia win.

Would that have been worth it? The destruction of history and innocent lives, versus the misery Rittenhouse was wreaking in the present?

"What happens to Jessica?" Lucy asked quietly.

"If she survives, she'll probably be held... off the grid. It's too dangerous to put her in prison. Flynn showed us that. It might even be too dangerous to put her on trial."

"You realize you're talking about the indefinite detention of an American citizen."

Denise's lips tightened. "Not indefinite," she said. "Just until we defeat these bastards, and we  _can_ put her on trial. If she cooperates, that day will come sooner and her sentence will be lighter."

"Garcia was the one who shot her," Lucy blurted after a minute.

"I know. He told me before he went into surgery."

"He probably saved Wyatt's life, but... Wyatt's not going to see it like that."

"Give me a little more credit than that."

Lucy jumped in her seat, and looked up at Wyatt.

"I still don't  _like_ him, but... There's no reason to bring a very pregnant woman to a fight unless..."

Long pause.

"Unless they knew I— wouldn't— fight her." He tilted his chin up and stared at Denise. "You gonna court martial me again for that?"

Someone had explained to Denise about Wyatt and Rufus's trip to 1983, of which she'd had no memory after Rittenhouse had brought Jessica back. So she didn't look confused, just unamused. "Don't be ridiculous."

Wyatt broke eye contact first. He looked down. "Lucy, could I... talk to you?"

Denise looked at Lucy for a moment before she gave them privacy. From the look on his face, Wyatt hadn't missed that.

Wyatt very gingerly sat next to Lucy on the padded bench. For a few minutes, neither of them said anything. "How's Flynn?" he asked abruptly.

"Alive." She hesitated. "Any change with Jessica?" She suspected not, judging by the fact that he was here instead of downstairs outside the ICU.

He made a non-committal noise. "That's not... what I wanted to talk about."

Lucy waited.

"Look, ever since we slept together and Jessica came back—"

Lucy just could not handle this right now. She got up.

"— I tried to do right by both of you," he said, voice raised behind her, "and all I did was fuck it up."

She stopped.

It was great that he realized this. It was. But between worrying about Jiya and Connor and  _everything else_ , she just... didn't have any spare emotional capacity right now.

Nevertheless, she turned around.

"And I'm sorry," he added. "I'm sorry for a lot of things." He paused. "Look, would you— sit down? Please?"

She hesitated, then sat.

"I'm not sorry I fell in love with you," he said after a minute. "I  _couldn't_ be. But for the rest of it—" He hesitated. "I kept telling myself I just wanted to make sure you were okay, but I think the truth was, I... didn't like you pushing me away."

_I had to, Wyatt_ . Having him so eager for her company while he was choosing to be with Jessica had been like... someone rubbing salt in her wound, and someone taunting her with water on a scorching day, all at the same time. 

"I thought I was concerned for you, but... mostly I think I was a selfish jackass."

"Wyatt—"

"Mm-mm. Don't try to talk me out of this one, Lucy." He looked down at his hands. "When I saw Jessica lying there— I—"

"Knew you weren't over her?" Lucy finished quietly, after a long pause.

He looked a little startled.

"Wyatt, this isn't news. You told me you loved me within a day after you lied to us all to keep her in the bunker. You don't get over someone that fast. It just— I knew, okay?"

"Geez, Lucy. I— I'm sorry." He shook his head. "It's not— it's not like it sounds, okay? I mean, she—" He grimaced. "I know what she is now. I just need..."

"Time?" she guessed, after he stopped talking again. "Closure?"

"Yeah," he said. "Something like that." He looked over at her. "It kinda feels like we're the only ones left," he said. "And I... was hoping you might be willing to start over. Be friends again."

"I don't want to start over, Wyatt."

His face fell.

"We don't  _need_ to start over. Just because we... slept together and it didn't work out doesn't wipe out our friendship. We can..." She hesitated. "We can move on." She studied his face, the lines of which she knew so well. "Can't we?"

He met her gaze without flinching. Slowly, he nodded.

She still wasn't ready to trust that he wouldn't hurt her again if they— got together that way. She wasn't sure she ever would be, because one thing this war had taught her was self-preservation. But she trusted him that this was what he wanted, and that he valued her friendship as something more than just a stepping stone to romance.

And, honestly? This whole apologizing and taking responsibility thing? It was attractive. So much of what she'd felt for him was still there. But it felt less urgent, these days. If that was a little sad, well, it also felt less painful, and that was a tradeoff she was willing to make.

Besides...

She glanced at the door to Garcia's room. It suddenly hit her how  _infrequently_ she worried about disappointing him.

No wonder his company was so restful.

Besides, there was Garcia. And Wyatt was attractive and she cared deeply about him, but Garcia, in addition to having those traits himself, drew an honesty out of her that no one else ever had. Maybe because she'd seen him at his worst, she trusted him with  _her_ worst.

Suddenly, she remembered the conversation she'd overheard between Garcia and Wyatt— had that really been today? yesterday? it was all running together— and grimaced.

"Anything else you want me to apologize for?" he asked wryly.

She looked at him, eyes narrowed, considering. "I know it was you who stole my wasabi peas in the bunker."

He snorted, and almost smiled.

"Wyatt..." She hesitated. "I know this isn't what you want to hear, but— you said you want closure, and—"

"I'm not gonna get it from her, Lucy. She's not my Jessica." His voice went low and husky, and he looked pained. "It's not  _this_ Jessica I'm not— over. It's... I just..." He swallowed. After a long moment, he said, "I was thinking of asking Agent Christopher for everything she has on us. Read through, see how familiar it sounds. You know, try to get it through my thick skull that— that it didn't happen like I remember." His voice dropped even further. "At least, not in this timeline."

"That doesn't make your memories any less real," she told him after a minute.

He closed his eyes. "I know."

And maybe that was the problem.

"I  _hate_ that—" He bit those three words out, then stopped.

She looked at him, and waited.

"They erased my Jessica. Now that we know it's possible to travel in your own timeline, maybe..."

"Maybe you could have saved her," Lucy supplied, when he didn't finish.

He nodded, slowly. "You know that's not what I was thinking about when you and me..."

"I know."

"But now— I can't. They went back and they recruited Jessica to Rittenhouse, and... my Jess is just  _gone_ ." His voice cracked. "And if I go back and stop them, then her brother pays the price. I can't bring her back without killing him. Even if I could stop her killer in 2012."

"It's more complicated, but you could still do it. Go back, shoot Rittenhouse, and save Kevin the same way they saved him."

"Yeah, but  _how?_ They would've needed a doctor—" He frowned. "You think they used your dad?"

"My  _dad_ was a finance manager, so no, I don't think they used him. Benjamin Cahill is a pediatric surgeon, not an oncologist, so I doubt they used him either." She paused. "Maybe he found them someone? But this is a problem we can  _solve_ , Wyatt. If we can escape the Alamo, and the Murder Castle, we can find a doctor to save Jessica's brother."

He grimaced, but didn't argue. Maybe he agreed with her, or maybe he didn't feel like pushing it. "I should, um. Get back there. They're, uh," he said softly. "They're going to do an emergency C-section. Said it was the best chance to save..." He swallowed. "Both of them."

"... oh." She put her arms around him again, and hugged him tightly. He made a surprised noise, but leaned into her. His stubble was rough against her cheek. "It's going to be okay," she whispered.

"Mm." He gently rubbed her shoulder. "Thanks, Lucy."

Wyatt went back downstairs. Lucy got herself a cup of coffee. She tried not to worry about Jiya and Connor. Jiya had already been taken prisoner by Rittenhouse once. Lucy hoped to God she wasn't there again.

She was finally allowed in to see Garcia. She dragged the chair to the far side of his bed so she could watch the door. He had a private room, courtesy of Denise and the need to keep anyone from knowing someone on Interpol's Most Wanted list was here.

His eyes barely glittered under his eyelids. Not knowing what else to do, she reached out and held his hand.

"'cy?" he whispered after a while.

She squeezed his hand. "Hey."

He took three slow breaths in and out before he spoke again, barely audible. "Hurt?"

"No. I'm fine. You kept me safe."

He slowly squeezed her hand back. It unsettled her to see just how weak he was.

"Go back to sleep," Lucy suggested. "I'm not going anywhere."

For a few minutes, she thought he had, until: "No cuffs?"

What?

_Oh_ . The last time he'd been in a hospital setting—

"No," she said, "and if they  _try_ , I'll raise hell."

That must have satisfied him; he didn't talk again, and after a while, she knew he was asleep. She didn't let go of his hand until it slipped out of hers as he relaxed.

#

Wyatt stared down at his baby daughter through the isolette.

She  _was_ his. Considering, well,  _everything_ , Agent Christopher had had Grace's paternity tested. She was definitely, incontrovertibly, Wyatt's.

God, how could something so tiny and so  _new_ make him feel so... so... 

He hastily wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

She was doing okay. You know, for a baby in a special care nursery. But the doc had assured Wyatt that she wasn't particularly worried, right now. Part of the problem was no one knew exactly how premature Grace was, but she was well over five pounds, so that was good. The nurse had explained that one of the biggest challenges for near-term preemies was underdeveloped lungs, but apparently, if that had been a problem, they would've known already. And kind of terribly.

And she wasn't in the NICU, so... so that was a big deal, apparently.

"Are you ready for your first kangaroo session, Mr. Logan?" a brisk voice asked behind him.

He turned to the nurse, who was carrying a bottle and other stuff. "Um... what?"

"We strongly encourage parents—"

_Parents_ . He was a fucking  _parent_ .

"—to practice skin-to-skin contact while their infant feeds. It helps the baby maintain a constant body temperature and it promotes bonding."

"What do I, uh, do?"

"You loosen your shirt so you can place her against your skin, you feed her, and then you let her sleep. We recommend doing about sixty to ninety minutes to accommodate a full sleep cycle."

"Sixty to ninety minutes, huh? Be right back." A preemptive pit stop seemed like a good idea.

The nurse looked vaguely surprised to see him return. Did she have a lot of dads freak out and bail?

"Make yourself comfortable here—" She indicated the chair next to the isolette. "Take your shirt off, I'll hand you Grace and the bottle, and you can drape her with this." She put a blanket on the seat.

He undid his shirt, shrugged out of his undershirt, and put his shirt back on but left it open. The room was chilly, a contrast to the muggy hellscape outside—

The nurse handed him Grace, and his mind just  _blanked out._

_Oh God._ She was so  _tiny_ and— and—  _his_ — 

"Move your arm like— there you go." She adjusted the way Wyatt was holding Grace, and then handed her the bottle. "Let's see if she'll take it, hmm?"

Grace  _devoured_ it. "Nothing wrong with her appetite, huh," Wyatt muttered, smiling down at her. "Yeah, eat all that. There you go. Grow up big and strong like, uh—" He had to think about that. "There's gotta be someone tall in the family tree  _somewhere_ ."

The nurse laughed. "Looks like she's doing great. I'll be back to check on you two in a bit."

The nurse left them alone. Across the room, a young family was staring worriedly into an isolette, and another nurse was feeding a baby. But no one was paying any attention to the two Logans.

Oh God. He didn't know if he could cope. Not— not with the nurse being gone, with  _all_ of it. He didn't feel like panicking. He just felt— overwhelmed—

She was so freaking  _new_ . Not even a day old. All red and wrinkly, sparse fine hair on an oversized head. Her face was barely the size of his hand, and her little tiny fingernails— you practically needed a microscope.

_Holy shit_ . He felt dazed.  _Me and Jess_ made _this._

Well, mostly Jess, if you wanted to be technical about the biology of it all— but—

But he couldn't think about— about Grace's mom right now. He just couldn't.

Grace was perfect, and amazing, and he was sniffling. This must happen all the time in here or there wouldn't be a tissue box on the side table. He grabbed a tissue, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose.

He'd been honestly convinced J— honestly convinced the whole baby thing was a lie until, what, thirty-six hours ago? He'd wanted desperately to be wrong. But he'd shoved those secret hopes way, way down where they never saw the light of day, because the only time he thought about them was when he couldn't sleep and refused to try booze.

And now— here she was—

He really was gonna cry, wasn't he. Damn it. He tried to keep his tears off Grace's hair.

The nurse— Marcie, her name tag said— reappeared just as Grace finished the bottle, to show Wyatt how to burp her. Wyatt sniffled aggressively, and quickly wiped his eyes.

Then, with the burping done, Grace settled against his chest with all the charm of a sleepy cat. And Wyatt—

He knew his situational awareness had gone to shit.  _Bad move, soldier._ There could've been a parade of elephants in the corridor and he probably wouldn't've noticed. He couldn't spare any attention from her. She was perfect, and cuddling the warm weight of her against his chest was perfect, and he knew he probably had a dopey grin a mile wide on his face but he didn't  _care_ .

Rittenhouse was still out there. Jessica... was hovering between life and death. And Lucy...

But even with so much gone so wrong, this moment, right here— he wouldn't trade it for anything.

His baby daughter. His little girl.

This bonding shit was no joke.

_Nothing's gonna hurt you,_ he thought, with the fierceness of a blood oath.  _I'm not gonna let it_ .

A risky promise, even just inside his own head. So much was out of his control. And it wasn't like his dad  _or_ Jessica's parents had exactly been stellar role models. But that just stiffened his resolve.

"I'll do better for you," he whispered.

He thought of how close she'd come to being born in Rittenhouse. If not for Flynn's bullet—

The thought of this helpless little thing at the mercy of those merciless bastards left him cold.

Grace squirmed and made a face. Wyatt realized he'd tensed up. "Shhh, shhhh, 's all right," he whispered, making himself relax. "Your dad's just a big dumb."

She settled down again. Every time he looked away from her, just for a second, and looked back— he was dumbstruck all over again.

Marcie came by, looked down at them, and gave him an encouraging smile. These nurses had to know Grace was the one born by emergency C-section to a mom who'd come in with a bullet in her and was now under armed guard, but they weren't treating her like she was anything unusual that Wyatt could tell. He felt a rush of gratitude for that.

But,  _God_ — he'd nearly failed her right from the very beginning.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't think you were real. I'm so sorry."

He was glad he'd already talked to Lucy, because holding his little girl was making it abundantly clear he needed to get his shit together in a hurry. And, well... trying to work things out with Lucy was part of that.

He still felt a painful pang at the thought of her, but it felt more distant than before, overwhelmed by the reality of the infant in his arms. Once, he'd dared to— to kind of eye sideways, the idea that maybe he and Lucy'd have their own kids one day. Together. Grace wasn't Lucy's, she was Jessica's, but Wyatt still couldn't bring himself to want to change a single thing about her. Not even that. Especially not that.

He closed his eyes and grabbed a fresh tissue. When you had that little hair, you'd definitely feel it if someone cried all over your head.

He pictured his dad's scorn if he could see Wyatt now. Wyatt was fine with that. Except for knowing how to fix a car, he pretty much aspired to be the exact opposite of his dad in every way, so... if Dad would've thought crying over your newborn was the wrong thing to do, Wyatt didn't feel too bad about doing it.

Grace was drooling on him.

Wyatt just shifted a little farther down in the chair, and leaned back...

He jerked awake. How long had it been? He'd been  _out_ — and Grace was still out, leaning against him as if he were her own personal pillow. His arm was starting to ache. He shifted her to a slightly more comfortable position.

He dozed again before Marcie returned. "Are you ready for me to put her down?" Marcie asked quietly.

"Um—" His arm tightened. "Do I have to be?"

"She's probably going to be ready to eat again soon."

Wyatt frowned. Headwise, that made sense, but it had never really sunk in before just  _how often_ babies ate. "Can't I do that?"

Marcie recovered from her surprise quickly. "You want to go another cycle with her? Absolutely. It's the best thing you could do for her."

"Mmm." Wyatt bent and kissed the top of Grace's head. She had this smell he'd never imagined, but it hit him like a ton of bricks.

Marcie brought him a footstool. He propped his feet up and leaned back even further. "Thank you," he whispered.

"You're welcome. We'll make up another bottle when she wakes. Just remember, you  _can_ put her down."

"You just said this was the best thing for her."

Marcie hesitated. "Is this your first, Mr. Logan?"

"Yeah." It came out rougher than he intended.

"Can I offer you some advice? I raised three, and now I'm raising my granddaughter," she explained.

"Please. I'm gonna need all the advice I can get."

"Don't try to be Superman. Especially not your first day as a parent. It's always gonna feel like there's something more you could be doing. And maybe there is. But it's okay to say, 'this is enough.' Hold her as  _long_ as you want, honey. But when you need to leave, she'll be fine here with us. Really."

Wyatt cleared his throat. "Uh, thanks."

"You're welcome."

When Marcie had gone, Wyatt slouched down a few more inches in the chair. Agent Christopher knew where to find him if there was news— he dug his phone out and glanced at it, to make sure she hadn't been trying to get a hold of him. Nope. And if there was nothing he needed to do out there? There was no place on earth he wanted to be besides here.

He nuzzled Grace's scant hair, and closed his eyes again.

#

They gathered in Garcia's room.

His eyelids were still heavy, but he was far more alert today. When she came in, he glanced from Denise to her, past her, and frowned. He looked— grim and pained, and it wasn't all physical pain. Something in his expression reminded her of when they were enemies.

He looked behind her again. She looked over her own shoulder. No one there.

He wouldn't make eye contact with either of them. "The Logan baby?"

Lucy glanced at Denise, whose own expression took on that rare softness. "Delivered by C-section and doing fine," Denise said.

That dangerous, edged look left his face, leaving him simply looking done in. Lucy moved to the far side of the bed and took the seat she'd occupied yesterday. So she was facing the door when Wyatt came through. He looked—

She'd never before seen anyone look shellshocked and radiant at the same time.

It almost hurt to see the lingering warmth in his face, but it was a good pain, and she found herself smiling at him as a purely instinctive response to that joy.

Then she glanced down at Garcia. His eyes were closed, and maybe it was just because she knew him so much better now, but the visibility of  _his_ pain startled her.

She almost took his hand, but he very much would not want her to call attention to his— feeling.

He touched his tongue to his top lip, and opened his eyes. "Congratulations, Wyatt," he managed.

Wyatt's face softened in a way she'd never expected to see directed at  _Garcia_ . "Thanks."

Denise sat across from Lucy. Wyatt stood at the foot of the bed. The four of them, all that remained of the bunker team in the— in the now. They started their— what else was this but a council of war?

"The autopsies came back on the dead agents," Denise began. "I was hoping we might find out where they'd been staying recently, but the coroner turned up anomalies."

"What kind of anomalies?" Lucy asked.

"The kind consistent with birth and maturity in the 19 th century."

Lucy stared at her. Wyatt looked grim. Garcia was inscrutable.

"... son of a bitch," Lucy finally managed. "Those trips that we couldn't figure out—"

"She was taking people out of the past." Wyatt sounded tired. "Probably saving their lives in exchange for loyalty."

It was blindingly obvious in retrospect. Lucy should have figured this out before.

"How many trips?" Garcia asked. "The two blizzards—"

"But she made multiple trips each time. Carrying more people back and forth," Lucy said.

"— and then all those trips to Iowa." Garcia grimaced. "She wanted people with different birth dates and death dates, to maximize the decades she could hit."

"No," Lucy realized. She shook her head. "No. I mean, yes to wanting people who could jump to different times, but— you don't just yank someone out of the 19 th century and dump them in the 21 st . She was leaving them in the 20 th century to get acclimated. And trained. Her own bunker, except sequestered in time instead of space."

"That explains—" Wyatt hesitated. "Grace."

Right: how Jessica could be not yet showing in Chinatown, and two months later be just about due. Emma must have sent her back to Iowa to look after the base there.

They were all quiet a minute. Then Wyatt added, "Also explains what was bothering me about those agents Jiya and I fought in Baltimore. They struck me as ex-soldiers, but they were so young."

"Baltimore was, what, 25 years before the Snow Winter? Emma must've picked the youngest of the Lost Company for that mission. And regulations on enlistment age were a lot more lax back then."

"Before Emma interfered," Wyatt said. "Who was listed as missing after the other blizzard?"

"Not soldiers. Regular people, farmers, teachers— ... kids."

They looked at each other.

"Well, we already knew Rittenhouse likes to indoctrinate kids." Wyatt sounded grim.

"At least there's an upper limit on the number of people Emma could have taken out of the past," Denise said after a minute. "We know how many people the Mothership can carry, and we know how many trips she took. Between Baltimore and what happened two days ago, you must have accounted for a significant portion of them."

"Lucy," Garcia said. "Weren't there other changes you couldn't figure out?"

"Yeah, I— oh.  _Oh_ . The sheriff of this little township outside Boston changed. Maybe Emma stole some people out of the jail, and the sheriff took the fall." Lucy shook her head. "She could've been taking people out of dire circumstances on every trip. Philadelphia, New York City, Maine... Even Iowa in the '30s. Rittenhouse could've been taking people from all over the state. All over the  _country_ . She could have a small army by now." Lucy felt sick.

"Well, at least we know she's desperate," Wyatt said finally. "Either what's left of Rittenhouse isn't supporting her—"

"Or there  _isn't_ much left of Rittenhouse," Lucy finished. "And Connor was right."

The  _at least_ didn't particularly comfort her, though. Emma, cornered and desperate, would be even more dangerous. "Do we have any leads on their base?"

Denise shook her head.

"Do we know how they  _found_ us?" Wyatt asked.

Denise hesitated.

With a sinking feeling, Lucy waited.

Denise glanced at her. "You used your Stanford credentials to log in the other day, didn't you? They seem to have had a mole in the Stanford IT department and gotten a trace on your IP address that way. That wouldn't have given them our exact location, but—"

"But it was enough," Lucy whispered, stricken. "I didn't even think. I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault," Wyatt said firmly. "You couldn't have known Emma had a mole inside your old department."

"I should've known. My mother built that department. Of course she'd still have allies there."

"Wyatt's right," Denise said. "I would've warned you if I'd thought about it, but I didn't. Neither did Connor. Don't blame yourself."

Lucy didn't agree, but she wouldn't make them try to comfort her any longer. "Anything on Jiya and Connor?"

"No. You'll know when I do."

"Rittenhouse could have the Lifeboat," Lucy said. "They could be changing history without us ever noticing. Even if they  _don't_ have the Lifeboat, they could be wreaking havoc with the Mothership."

"You shot Emma," Garcia said. "She's not in any shape to pilot."

"But we know they have another pilot. Emma could still be calling the shots."

"If they don't have the Lifeboat," Wyatt said, "that hard drive is still in it. If Jiya and Connor went farther back in time than the Mothership, we'll know what they did."

"Even if we don't," Garcia said slowly. "We pick a pressure point. We start there."

Denise eyed him. This was the first she was hearing of Garcia's argument that they should take the offensive, but she didn't get into it while Garcia was so weak.

"New evidence suggests they don't have the Lifeboat," she said instead. "Autopsies of the dead agents in the cave shows they were shot, and the bullets don't match any gun we found on the scene."

"Jiya had several pistols," Lucy said. Garcia had been slowly accumulating the modern guns they took off Rittenhouse agents in the past, and Jiya must have taken that cache.

"But if other Rittenhouse agents had captured her after she shot these two—" Wyatt began.

"They would've disarmed her," Denise finished. "And the gun would be there."

Unless this second pilot had been there, too. Unless they hadn't needed Jiya to pilot the Lifeboat at all, but had— Lucy swallowed. Had killed her and dumped her body somewhere.

But they probably wouldn't have dumped the gun along with her. Right?

Such a fragile thread on which to hang her hopes.

"What I  _don't_ get," Denise added, "is the entry angle on the wounds. It's almost like they were shot from the ladder, but their bodies were turned the wrong way for that."

Garcia opened his mouth, and hesitated. "Jiya had a hidey-hole near the ceiling."

All three of them looked at him.

"What?" Denise said.

"There's a crevasse in the rock. She hung a rope and figured out how to swing across from the ladder."

"What?" Wyatt said. "No. Someone would've seen her."

Garcia looked at him. "You really never noticed that she disappeared for  _hours_ at a time and couldn't be found  _anywhere_ ?"

"I— I thought she wanted privacy." Wyatt echoed Lucy's own thoughts. Lucy had assumed that when Jiya couldn't be found, she didn't want to be. In such a small house, Lucy had tried to let people disappear when they wanted to.

"She did, and she found it there." Garcia looked back to Denise. "She could've ambushed the agents from there."

"... okay," Denise said. "... thank you for clearing that up. Next item: we can't stay here long. I'm looking for a new base, and as soon as Flynn can be moved—"

"Send them ahead," Garcia said immediately. "We don't have the Lifeboat, they can hole up in a hotel if they have to until we find somewhere else."

Denise shook her head. "Grace can't be moved yet, either. And I'm not sending Lucy alone."

"We're sitting ducks," Garcia argued. "They have to know we're here."

"Your records, Grace's records, Jessica's records have all been faked. Fake patients matching your descriptions are supposedly at a hospital over in Tampa. And I have people watching every entrance here."

"They don't need to get in. If they know we're here, they can bomb the whole damn place. All it takes is one low-flying little plane."

"We're leaving together," Denise said firmly.

"That's ridiculous. You're putting the team in danger."

"Nobody's going to bomb the hospital," Denise said.

"Rittenhouse absolutely would." Lucy looked up to find Denise and Garcia watching her.

"They would," Denise agreed. "But if they're so short on people Emma has to recruit from the 19 th century, I seriously doubt they have the people to find us, find a plane, find some bombs, and take out the hospital, all while Emma's out of commission. Besides." She glanced at Wyatt. "Unless they abandoned Jessica, they won't destroy the building while she's here."

"Does mean they'll be trying even harder to find us," Wyatt pointed out. It was his turn not to make eye contact. "Did you check her for a tracker?"

"Yes. She's clean."

The conversation didn't last long after that, largely because Garcia was visibly exhausted. They hadn't actually made any decisions— if you didn't count 'staying together' as a decision— but Lucy was still glad they'd met. They were all that was left, right now. Jiya and Connor  _would_ come back, they'd  _get_ Rufus back, but right now— just the four of them being together was comforting.

Lucy stayed after Denise and Wyatt left, and sank back down in the chair. She wasn't going to stay long, but— "Garcia, I'm so sorry."

He looked up at her.

"I keep being careless and you keep taking the consequences." To see him here, so badly injured, and know she'd helped that happen, was a gut blow.

"Don't be sorry," he said after a minute, eyes closing. "Be careful."

She swallowed past a sudden lump in her throat. "It's a deal." She hesitated. "Do you need anything?"

He shook his head.

Even putting aside her carelessness— if she'd been  _better_ , faster, braver, shot straighter, maybe he wouldn't be hurt. Maybe Jiya and Connor would be here. She kept telling herself she'd do whatever it took to take Rittenhouse down, and yet, when it came down to it, she was never good enough.

But that wasn't his problem to deal with, and if she said something, he might try to convince her she was wrong when he should be resting. So, instead, she said, "I'll let you sleep."

Wyatt must've lingered to talk to Denise, because she caught up with him at the elevator. "Hey, um," she said. "I was just wondering..."

He looked up at her.

"... can Grace have visitors yet?"

"You want to meet her?" Wyatt asked after a minute.

"Of course I want to  _meet_ her." His faint surprise might've wounded her under other circumstances, but they'd all had a terrible week. "I just— I knew they were doing a lot of tests, and I didn't want to get in the way, and... But if she's up to visitors, I could, you know. Start corrupting her early."

"Fine," Wyatt said, "but if I catch you trying to teach her the presidents, you're out." His sideways smirk did her heart good.

Lucy followed him inside the special care nursery. "So, uh." Wyatt stopped in front of one particular small plastic box. "Lucy, meet Grace Cody Logan." He tried to sound nonchalant. He failed miserably.

"Cody?" Lucy studied her. She'd never taken Wyatt for the type to give his kids trendy names.

"Family name."

Lucy had been waiting all her life for her maternal instincts to kick in, as popular culture had assured her they someday would. Looking down at the tiny wrinkled red thing in the isolette, she had the sudden realization that...

Yep, still waiting.

"She's very, uh..." Lucy fumbled for some complimentary-sounding adjectives. She hadn't been particularly close to her colleagues in the department with babies, and none of the friends in her "normal" life had had kids recently, so it wasn't a skill she'd needed lately.

"Raisin-like?" Wyatt suggested. "Or would you say she's more of a potato?"

Lucy almost sputtered indignantly before she realized he was teasing her. "She looks like a very healthy potato."

"She is."

And that wasn't something to take for granted, considering how Grace had been born.

Lucy thought of Jessica, still fighting for her life upstairs, and felt... she wasn't sure what she felt. But from the sudden silence and the look on Wyatt's face, he was thinking along those lines, too.

The moment thankfully ended when Grace started crying. One of the nurses came over, and—

— and Wyatt started taking off his shirt.

"... what are you, uh, doing?"

"Feeding her."

"Oh." Right, of course you—

Wait. No. What?

"It's the skin-to-skin thing," Wyatt added. "Supposed to be good for them."

Lucy swallowed, but the memories prompted by the intersection of Wyatt and  _skin-to-skin_ were more distant than they had been. That was a little sad, maybe— but it also hurt less.

Wyatt sat down with Grace nestled against his chest, but she didn't want to settle. She must've been pretty hungry. Lucy watched Wyatt's attention wholly focused on his young daughter, and...

She felt guilty, that her reaction was anything besides unadulterated joy. But thoughts of what could've been echoed in her mind.

He looked up suddenly, and their eyes met. He gave her a regretful, wistful look, and she realized he could probably tell what she was thinking.

She was glad they'd talked earlier. Because things had changed now. Grace was his priority now, as it should be, as it had to be. Maybe, in a different timeline—

But, broken as this timeline was, Lucy couldn't regret it. Not this part of it, anyway. Wyatt had a healthy little girl, and she thought they could be friends again. And maybe they could fix anything else.

She smiled. "She's lovely, Wyatt." She found she could say it wholeheartedly.

She perched awkwardly on a chair as Wyatt fed Grace, and then slipped out when she fell asleep. Wyatt's own eyes were heavy, and they couldn't talk without waking Grace, anyway. Lucy hesitated, then went back to Garcia's room. He stirred when the door opened, but closed his eyes again when he saw it was just her.

She settled down in the chair by the bed.

#

Lucy closed the door behind her and felt her shoulders slump.

"How'd it go?" Denise frowned in concern. She'd been against Lucy going in to talk to Jessica in the first place, but Lucy had insisted.

"No response. Either she was sleeping or she was doing an excellent job of pretending." Lucy suspected the latter. But maybe not. Jessica wasn't in mortal danger any more, but fighting for her life had exhausted her.

Denise didn't look surprised. "At least you tried."

Lucy nodded once. She stared at the floor, then looked up. "Any—"

"No word from Jiya or Connor, but I have a lead on a new base. Out west."

Lucy nodded again, then hurriedly covered her mouth when she yawned so widely the tears came.

"When was the last time you slept?" Denise asked, frowning. "And not in a chair by Flynn's bed?"

"I, uh..." Lucy honestly couldn't remember. The hours and days were blurring together. How many nights had it been since Emma had attacked? Just two? Or was it three? "When was the last time  _you_ slept?"

"This is my job," Denise said. "I'm used to it."

"Yeah, well, I survived grad school."

Denise looked at her, trying not to smile. "Go sleep, Lucy. I'll have an agent take you to the hotel."

Lucy tried to protest, but another huge yawn turned all her words indistinct. "Fine."

A taciturn, pale agent with short-cropped hair escorted her to the door of their hotel room, then made Lucy wait by the doorway as she searched the room. "I'll be outside," she told Lucy when she was satisfied it was clear.

Lucy gave her an awkward smile of thanks and bolted the door behind her. She felt guilty about being here when everyone else was at the hospital. Wyatt had gone just as long as she had without sleeping, while Garcia had spent the day drifting in and out of a heavy, drug-induced sleep. She didn't like the thought of him waking alone and disoriented in that little room.

But the decadence of a warm shower lulled her. She really did need to sleep. She got out, dried off, and collapsed into bed, wishing she could stay there for about twenty-four hours. She dropped into a deep sleep almost immediately.

The sirens woke her.

She sat up fast.

Red and blue lights flashed outside the window, reflecting off some nearby wall. That was a  _lot_ of sirens. And they weren't moving away—

Someone pounded on the door. "Doctor Preston!"

Not the agent from before— a man's voice. Lucy tensed, swung her legs out of bed, and looked around. She grabbed the lamp from the bedside table and yanked the cord out of the wall. She crept to the door. "Who is it?"

"Agent Higgins. Agent Christopher sent me to escort you to the hospital."

Uh-huh. "Did she."

"She told me to call you Lacey."

Lucy hesitated. Only she, Denise, and Jiya should know that. But if Rittenhouse had captured Jiya...

If it were Rittenhouse outside, they'd be breaking down the door.

She took the chain off, eased the door open, and waited, lamp clutched tightly. Nothing happened. Trying to remember all the things about stealth and security she'd ever learned from Garcia or Wyatt, she peeked out.

A tall, dark-skinned Homeland Security agent in a bulletproof vest was watching her with bemusement. She hesitated, checked the hallway, then put the lamp down.

"Here." He held up one hand in a  _it's-okay_ gesture. "I'm not supposed to do this, but..." Slowly, he drew his pistol, and offered it to her, butt first. "Better?"

"Oh. Um." Lucy took it. After weeks of practice, its familiarity in her hand unnerved her. It made her remember shooting and killing three people back at the house. "Thanks." She hesitated. "What happened?"

"Someone attacked the hospital. Details aren't clear."

Her heart sank. "Is anyone... dead?"

"I don't know."

They hurried to the hospital, the agent cradling his rifle and sending sharp looks in every direction. They crossed a cordon of more Homeland Security agents and entered the hospital. The agent led Lucy down a maze of windowless corridors. She didn't see any bodies or blood—

She broke into a run when she saw Denise and Wyatt ahead of her, outside the special care nursery. Neither of them looked hurt, but the location—

"Oh thank God," she breathed as she reached them. "What happened? Was it—"

"Rittenhouse," Denise said grimly.

"Grace and Garcia?"

Wyatt and Denise looked at each other. Horror overwhelmed Lucy— No, if Grace had— Wyatt would be— but what about—

" _They're_ fine," Wyatt said.

"They were here primarily for Jessica," Denise said.

Lucy hesitated. "Is she—"

"They took her," Wyatt said. His mouth flattened. "Doubt she put up a fight."

Not recovering from a C-section with a bullet hole in her hip, anyway.

"We're leaving as soon as we can," Denise said. "You two will take Grace to Ellsworth Air Force Base and drive from there. Flynn shouldn't be within twenty miles of a military base, let alone a TSA checkpoint, so he and I will drive from here."

"Uh, maybe you should go with Wyatt and I should go with Garcia," Lucy suggested.

Wyatt's expression went back to neutral very quickly, but she'd seen his surprise and then hurt. That hurt  _her_ , a little. They still had a ways to go.

Denise frowned. "Why?"

"Because I don't know anything about babies and Wyatt knows like three days' worth of things about babies." She glanced sideways, and saw Wyatt's belated flash of understanding.

"Well, no time to learn like the present," Denise said, with a dry smile.

"What about Jiya and Connor?" Wyatt asked.

"I made sure that when they get back to the present, they'll know how to find us." She paused. "The belongings and equipment from the house are on their way. They've been scanned for tracking devices. They might get there before you do. I'll send an agent to clear out the hotel room and—"

"If you can— stay here," Wyatt told her, glancing at the nursery door, "I'll do it."

Denise frowned. "I have people for that."

"Yeah, but this way I can shower. Otherwise Lucy's gonna spend the next twelve hours trying to pretend I don't smell."

"I wasn't actually going to pretend," Lucy said.

He looked at her.

"Fine," Denise said. "Make it quick. I'll be here when you get back."

Wyatt left with a nod and one last backward glance. Denise turned to her. "I have clothes for Flynn. Do you mind taking them up to him?"

"Does he know about this?"

"He knows about the attack. I haven't had a chance to tell him about the rest."

Lucy hesitated. "Are you sure I shouldn't go with him?"

"Don't worry, Lucy," Denise said with a faint smile. "Neither of us are going to kill the other. Flynn's in no shape to defend himself, let alone you, if you were to run into trouble on the road. You'll be safer with Wyatt, and Flynn'll be safer with me."

Lucy couldn't argue with that.

"None of us are going to  _enjoy_ this," Denise added. "But we'll get there in one piece."

When Lucy let herself into Garcia's room, he was sitting up, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. When he saw her, he relaxed, his right hand easing something under a fold of sheet. She didn't know what weapon he could possibly have, but she shouldn't be surprised.

"We're going?" His expression was pained, and maybe something else.

She nodded. "I'm flying with Wyatt and Grace. You're driving with Denise." She held out the stack of clothes. "Need help?"

He took them and shook his head. "They'll need to change the dressing before we go." He reached back to undo the ties of his gown, and grimaced.

Lucy took that as her signal to go. His face was hard and grim, he wasn't making a lot of eye contact right now, and... they'd never finished that conversation down by the creek. Something contracted painfully near her heart. "I  _will_ see you at the new base," she told him.

He nodded. Then: "Lucy—"

She turned back.

He studied her for a moment. "Be safe." Just like her own statement, it wasn't a request.

"I will," she promised. For the first time in days, his expression lightened a little.

#

It was a long, long trip to South Dakota.

Lucy understood viscerally, now, why guerrilla warfare took such a toll on its targets. As they drove to Jacksonville, she had no idea where to expect the next threat from.

"If Rittenhouse attacks again," she said, just after they'd left the hospital. "Take Grace and go. Don't wait for me."

"Lucy—"

"It's not up for debate."

"It's my job to protect you." He didn't say it with his usual certainty, which told Lucy how he was feeling.

"It is," she agreed. "But she needs you more."

She looked sideways at him in the passenger seat. His jaw was clenched.

"Isn't this why you and Garcia were teaching me and Jiya to fight and shoot these last weeks?" she added. "So we could protect ourselves better?" She glanced sideways again. "Put your daughter first, Wyatt."

Dear God, but she didn't want him to end up like Garcia.

Every time she had a horrifying thought like that, a little knot of dark guilt tightened in her stomach.  _I told Garcia I'd do whatever it takes to stop Rittenhouse. Am I? Am I really?_

"I asked Agent Christopher to find someone to look after her while we're gone," Wyatt said tightly, after a minute. "Someone she trusts. With Flynn down— you and Jiya aren't going alone."

No, that would be a terrible idea.

She didn't relax until they were actually airborne, and even then— should she be worried about rocket launchers? Surface-to-air missiles? Were those actually the same thing? Normally she'd ask Wyatt, but not when he was holding his baby daughter.

Grace's wails of pain continued after they leveled off, earning the three of them dirty looks. Lucy had no idea how Denise had arranged their passage on a troop transport, or what, if anything, the soldiers onboard had been told. But she noticed that  _she_ got more dirty looks than Wyatt, who was actually holding Grace, or Grace, who was actually making the noise.

Of course.

Wyatt spent the trip juggling Grace, blankets, formula, water bottles, chemical packs to heat the formula, diapers, and all the other stuff that went with that. Either he was too busy to notice the glares from the crusty old sergeant who clearly disapproved of men doing childcare, in general, and Wyatt and Lucy, in particular, or he just didn't care. The sergeant nearly turned apoplectic when Wyatt had to change Grace's diaper on the deck. Just what alternative did he think they  _had?_

They landed in Arkansas. Before anyone could disembark, military police boarded the plane. Lucy and Wyatt exchanged looks. The cops stopped when they reached the three of them. "Come with us, please."

Lucy looked at Wyatt.

"Are you taking us into custody?" Wyatt asked.

"We are escorting you off this aircraft."

That amazing non-answer did not ease Lucy's mind. She again watched Wyatt, ready to make a distraction...

He handed her Grace. Lucy held her awkwardly as Wyatt undid his restraints and stuffed everything in the diaper bag. Then he leaned over and undid her restraints. Under cover of maneuvering around Grace, he got his mouth close to her ear and whispered, "Take her and go. Pistol in the diaper bag."

Lucy tried not to react. She felt like her eyes were huge. Fighting her way out of the heart of a military base with a baby... Oh, God.

The other passengers watched them with undisguised curiosity and concern as the police led them down the ramp. The captain, or whatever you called the head of a group of military cops, leaned over and murmured something to Wyatt. Lucy didn't hear it. But whatever it was, Wyatt didn't attack.

The captain turned. Lucy turned, too, and realized they were now out of sight of the other passengers. Her heart hammered in her chest—

"We're escorting you to a safe place to wait for your next flight," the captain said. He gestured to a waiting cop car. "Sergeant, take the lady's bag."

Lucy tightened her grip on the strap. And on Grace. "Thanks, but I'm good."

"Why the cloak and dagger stuff?" Wyatt stopped outside the car.

"Orders were not to let anyone else know what was going on. No names, no details. Please. Let's get off this tarmac."

The first interpretable expression Lucy had seen crossed the man's face, and it was one of concern. Either he was taking this protective detail  _very_ seriously... or he deserved an Oscar.

She and Wyatt exchanged looks. Wyatt seemed to shrug, and opened the door for her. The car seat in the back seat was reassuring... but it could be there to lull them into a false sense of security.

They ended up in a windowless exam room in the infirmary. When a nurse offered to check Grace over, Wyatt accepted, but stared balefully at him the whole time. He appeared not to notice, and pronounced Grace just fine after the flight. He showed Wyatt where he could heat up formula, told them they'd be waiting about two hours for the next plane, and brought them some food.

Lucy looked at it as Wyatt fed Grace. "Do you think this is safe to eat?"

He glanced up. "Is it sealed?"

"Yeah."

"Should be. They want to capture us, they can do it a lot more easily than drugging us." His expression was grim.

So Lucy ate. Wyatt was being Grace's skin-to-skin personal heater again, and they both fell asleep as soon as Grace had finished her bottle.

She looked at them, and her heart ached a little. That was okay. Just because she and Wyatt had some painful times in their past, just because she couldn't help wondering what could've been, didn't mean she wasn't genuinely happy for him. The open wonder and adoration with which he looked at Grace made Lucy feel a lot of things, but foremost among them was gladness.

She leaned back in the chair— she'd made Wyatt take the exam table— and closed her eyes.

Where were the others?  _When_ were Jiya and Connor? How far would Garcia and Denise have gotten by now? That would be a tough trip for him, and she felt bad for him having this new pain just when he'd finally gotten over his chest wound.

She fell asleep calculating how far Denise and Garcia might've gotten on the road. She woke when Wyatt stirred, crinkling the paper on the table. He blinked sleepily at her, then looked down at Grace. "I read all those pamphlets they gave me in the nursery." His voice was low and rough with sleep. "Said it was important to make the first trip home with your new baby 'as quiet and gentle as possible.'" His mouth twisted. "Sorry, kid. Having to make do from the start."

"You know, I've heard parenting is exhausting, so you probably shouldn't waste energy blaming yourself for what you can't control."

Wyatt snorted.

"I saved you some food," Lucy added.

Wyatt shifted, then froze when Grace made a grumpy noise. He managed to get one arm free, and Lucy perched on the counter and handed him food one piece at a time. It was a messy operation.

"Damn it," he whispered, "I'm getting crumbs in her hair."

Lucy snorted.

"You're not helping!"

"Can you  _move_ her?"

"I've tried. She knows exactly where she wants to be and it's right in the middle of my chest."

Grace solved the problem by waking up and crying. She then announced that her gastrointestinal tract was in working order with an unmistakable sound— and  _smell_ .

"Oh, shit." Wyatt fumbled for the diaper bag.

"Clearly." Trying not to breathe, Lucy dug out all the necessaries, doing it much faster with two free hands to his one. "Do you, uh, need me..."

"Evacuate the battlefield," he told her resignedly. "Save yourself."

So she grabbed the empty bottle and escaped into the hallway. She stopped short at the presence of two armed guards outside the door.

"Orders are to escort you wherever you need to go," the shorter one explained, answering the question she hadn't formed yet and also squelching her spike of alarm.

"Oh. Um. I need to wash this." She held up the bottle.

"Is this your first?" the man asked as she washed and rinsed everything in the little break room.

"Oh— she's, uh, she's... I'm traveling as a friend of the family. But she's the first for my friend." She glanced at him. "What about you? Any kids?" He was wearing a wedding ring, and in Lucy's experience, the question was often asked by parents.

"We're raising my two nieces. My, uh... my brother was killed last year. Shot."

"I'm so sorry. Was he a soldier too?"

The man shook his head. "Just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"I'm sorry," Lucy repeated, as she patted the pieces dry.

"Thank you, ma'am."

She took her time about the drying and stopped at the bathroom on their way back. By the time she reached the exam room, Grace was changed and the miasma had dissipated... somewhat. Lucy held up the empty bottle. "Think she's hungry again?"

"It's a day ending in Y, so, yes." Wyatt sounded resigned. Grace started nuzzling at his chest. "Uh, yeah, definitely. Sorry, honey, the Dad model doesn't come with that equipment..."

Had Grace ever breastfed at all? Was this a reflex all babies had? Lucy couldn't remember from her culture of childcare class in undergrad, and she definitely wasn't about to ask Wyatt the details of Grace's birth just to satisfy her curiosity. She hurried off to heat some formula.

Even with traveling two time zones to the west, they still stumbled onto the tarmac in South Dakota around midnight. A doctor was waiting to examine Grace and make sure the trip hadn't done her any harm. Then there was a car waiting for them, and Denise had even ensured it had the right size car seat.

Lucy drove. The directions took them across the border into Nebraska, down increasingly isolated back roads, until they left pavement entirely for— ten? fifteen? miles. Finally they reached a long, low building flanked by two garages and some outbuildings.

One of the garages had no door. She was too tired to think about that just then. But the other garage opened readily. They parked. Then Lucy firmly refused to take Grace and let Wyatt go first inside.

She unlocked the front door, pushed it slowly open, and stepped into a darkened... living room.

A darkened,  _cool_ living room. Air conditioning. Whatever this place was, and it looked kind of like a college dorm, it had points on the Sauna already.

"Institutional furnishings, industrial-strength carpet... must be some kind of government halfway house," Wyatt murmured.

Lucy nodded, glancing through the living room to the little deck out back, then down the hall. "We passed a National Grasslands sign on the—"

Something moved in the shadows. Lucy jumped—

"Jiya!"

Lucy waited just long enough for Jiya to lower the pistol she was holding before hugging her tightly. "Oh my God," Lucy managed. "I'm so glad you're here." Tears of relief stung her eyes. "Are you okay? Where's Connor?"

"Right here," Lucy heard. But she clung to Jiya for another moment or two. When they let go, Jiya had teared up, too.

She gave Connor a more restrained hug as Wyatt and Jiya did the same—

"Oh my  _God_ ," Jiya said. " _What_ —"

"This is, um... my daughter." Wyatt put the carrier down and got Grace out. He'd tried to say it nonchalantly, but the warmth on his face could've powered a small city. "This is... Grace." Grace nuzzled at his chest again. "Okay. Dinner time, apparently, for the eleventh time today. Uh, where's the kitchen?"

Jiya, still staring, pointed. Wyatt grabbed the bag and disappeared in that direction.

When he was out of sight, Jiya— and Connor— turned their startled looks on Lucy. "Is that," Jiya said. " _What?_ "

"That's Wyatt and Jessica's daughter," Lucy said quietly. "Jessica— was at the house. I mean, she..." She hesitated. "Emma got away," she said after a minute. "But I shot her. Probably not fatally. Where were  _you?_ "

"The Seminole War." The way Jiya bit the words out made it clear she wasn't interested in elaborating.

Lucy studied her, concerned. "Are you okay?"

Jiya laughed, silent and mirthless. "We're not hurt."

That both avoided and answered Lucy's question.

"Look, we'll— talk more tomorrow, okay? It's like four am Florida time. We're all exhausted." Jiya gave her a brief but halfway sincere smile. "There's two bedrooms left, take your pick. Those boxes are the stuff from the Sauna."

Jiya disappeared down the hallway. Connor lingered. Lucy caught his eye. "How bad?" she asked quietly.

Connor blanched in a way that disconcerted her even more coming from him than it had from Jiya. "I never realized just how  _barbaric_ some of your history was until I had to live it."

Lucy shook her head. "I'm so sorry."

"Jiya was  _amazing_ ," Connor added after a minute. "Not that that should surprise any of us."

Lucy smiled.

"I'll see you in the morning, all right, Lucy?"

"All right."

The two open bedrooms were identical: two sets of bunk beds, a dresser at one end of the room, and a desk at the other. She tossed her jacket onto one of the lower bunks in the back bedroom and stuck her shoes under the bed, then hunted through the stack of boxes in the living room until she found what looked like her stuff. Hers and Garcia's. She'd unpack it all tomorrow.

Wyatt was feeding Grace in the kitchen. He looked exhausted. His first full day looking after his daughter... and it had been a  _full_ day.

"Either of you need anything?" Lucy asked, balancing a box on her hip.

Wyatt shook his head. "'ll try to keep her quiet," he muttered.

Lucy thought about pointing out that they'd all had to endure worse nighttime noises coming out of the Logan bedroom, but decided their relationship definitely wasn't repaired enough for her to tease him about that yet. Besides, thinking of him having loud, enthusiastic sex with Jessica just days after being with her...

Yeah, that still really hurt.

"'Night then." She gave him a brief smile and headed—  _finally_ — to bed.

#

He had definitely had worse.

He wasn't even close to death this time. Definitely not being hauled on a sling through the Dinarides. Not tossing and turning with malarial fever in Somalia after an unscrupulous supplier gave them bad prophylactics. Not fighting to keep his body temperature up in the cold, damp stone cell where he'd been tossed after being stripped. He'd had worse.

Every time a seam in the road jolted his leg, he reminded himself of that fact.

They were some twelve hours out of the hospital, somewhere in Tennessee. He was riding sideways, his back against one door and his bad leg stretched out in front of him, which made it harder to see road signs. He was dozing a lot, grateful for, but not surprised by, the fact that Agent Christopher didn't want to talk. She was, however, scrupulous about checking if he needed anything.

Well, he needed was information.

He cleared his throat. "How long do I have?"

"... how long until what? Do you need to stop?"

"To recover."

Pause. "The doctor said it would probably be—"

Her confusion disappointed him. He'd thought better of her, and hadn't thought she would pretend ignorance. "Until you send me back to prison."

She didn't answer. Well, it had been worth a try, though he was disappointed in her cowardice.

He felt the car slowing. He opened his eyes again.

The car pulled off the side of the highway and stopped. She unbuckled and slid over so she could turn and look at him. "What?"

He looked at her, unimpressed. She expected him to believe she hadn't even considered it? "You risked your career to break me out because you thought I could be an asset. Right now all I am is a total drain on your resources. How long?"

"I'm not sending you back to prison." Her disbelief mirrored his, tinged with a little disgust. "Do you have any idea why I agreed to break you out in the first place?"

"Yes. You needed my intel."

"Besides that."

"Lucy told you to."

She looked at him like he was a total wreck of a human being. Nothing new there. "Lucy can be a force of nature—"

God, couldn't she just.

"— but she doesn't  _tell_ me to do anything, Flynn."

Garcia eyed her.

"All right, I don't always listen," she corrected herself a little wryly. "No. By leaving you in there, we were sentencing you to death. And you didn't deserve that. You don't deserve that now." She watched him, gauging the effect of her words.

"As for being a drain on my resources," she continued, pronouncing the words with distaste, "you were shot protecting Lucy. You took down, what, four? five? Rittenhouse agents, covering her exit?"

Well, yes, of course.

"Not to mention neutralizing Jessica. I'd have to be both callous  _and_ stupid to throw you out after that. I know what you're capable of, Flynn."

"Has the doctor told you I may never get the full use of my leg back?"

"I know that's your phrasing, not hers, but I have seen your records, yes."

It startled and disturbed him how much he wanted to believe her.

She studied him with an infuriatingly soft expression. "Don't waste your energy worrying about this, Flynn. I look after my people. And, God help us both, you're one of them now."

"We both know in this business you don't always have a choice."

"I have a choice right now, and I'm making it." She stared him down. After a minute, she added, "Anything else?"

He shook his head, closed his eyes, and leaned back, exhausted again.

They stopped about two hours later. Agent Christopher returned with a plastic bag and passed it over the seat to him. "Eat something." Her tone did not brook disagreement.

Garcia cautiously investigated the contents. "Well, we're definitely in the South," he muttered. "Meat, seasoned with more meat. And fat, deep fried in oil, then rolled in grease." He concentrated on getting down some macaroni and cheese.

"That's not confined to the South," she said after a minute. "There's a billboard outside Rapid City, not far from where we're going, that says, 'Hunt, eat meat, wear fur: the American way.'"

Garcia snorted. Rapid City: not far from the base where Lucy and the Logans would arrive. "What time were they supposed to get there?"

"It'll be some hours yet."

Lucy...

They'd never finished that conversation by the creek.

And how, exactly,  _could_ they finish it? How would that go?

He pictured Lorena and Iris standing in front of him, and his heart tightened painfully. They deserved to be alive so much more than he did, yet he had lived and they had died. Not only had he failed to bring them back, he hadn't even managed to avenge them.

And if they were here—

They would not know him.

That was the crux of it. Even if Lucy were right, even if he was not too far gone to— to be part of a family, one day, he was not the man they knew. And he didn't know which would break his heart worse: pretending to be that man, or watching them figure it out.

Lucy—

Knew him,  _this_ him. Had seen him at his darkest. And was, improbably, still here.

It wasn't a question of who he— cared about, more. It was a question of... who he  _fit_ with.

And yet the sticking point for her wasn't what he'd done. He had no idea how she found it in her to... to  _forgive?_ the things he'd done, let alone want to spend any more time with him than strictly necessary. Yet she obviously  _did_ . No, the sticking point for her was the fear that she'd be... how had she put it?  _Second-best to another resurrected wife_ .

She didn't think  _he_ wasn't good enough for  _her_ — she, somehow, thought she herself was not good enough to come first.

He had never in his life met anyone who combined overwhelming courage and inexhaustible kindness like she did. That was just one of the many reasons she'd blazed across his life like a meteor. And it pained him to see her extend so much grace to other people, but be so unsure of herself. But that was not his battle to fight, and he couldn't do it for her.

He drifted off thinking of the times he'd seen her laugh. Agent Christopher's phone woke him. She handed it over the seat to him. "See who it is."

...  _you sure you want me to do that?_ Visions of what he could do with a senior Homeland Security Agent's personal phone flashed through his mind before he answered. "Hello?" he asked cautiously.

"... Flynn?"

"Jiya!" Thank God. Without her and the Lifeboat, they were done.

And...

As the car slowed, he considered that reaction. He hadn't known her well at all, before Rufus's death, but he'd thought she was, in some ways, the fiercest of any of them. Probably because she was the youngest, and hadn't, then, known the taste of defeat. Her three years in the past had tempered her, but like steel.

He was startled to realize his relief encompassed more than just having a pilot again.

"Why do you have Denise's phone?" she demanded.

He smiled despite himself. "She's driving. Hang on. Are you— uh, all right?"

"We're— fine." Her tone suggested they weren't at all fine, but that the injuries were not physical. "What about the rest of you?"

"We're... fine." Agent Christopher stopped by the side of the road, and he handed her the phone.

He dozed again, and woke when Agent Christopher stopped outside a motel sometime after midnight. She got them a room, then parked outside it. He managed to lever himself out of the back seat, and limp inside, leaning heavily on his crutches. Just those few steps brought pain strong enough to trigger nausea.

Agent Christopher tossed a first aid kit on the end of his bed. "Check your dressing."

He was too tired and pained to care about stripping down to his underwear in front of her. He set his teeth, wriggled out of his pants, checked the wound, and did what was needed. Then he tucked his gun under his pillow, propped his bad leg up on an extra pillow, and fell asleep before the pain could overtake the fatigue.

They ate leftover diner food for breakfast. Then he dragged himself into the bathroom for an awkward, painful bath, because he smelled and his hair was starting to mat to his head. He tried to get up, realized his miscalculation, planted one arm on either side of the tub, and hauled himself up that way until he could get his good leg under him. He perched on the edge of the tub, and promptly overbalanced and sprawled on the tile. He let out a pained exclamation.

"Flynn?"

He fought for breath to answer her—

"Flynn." Before he could stop her, the knob turned and she opened the door directly into his head. He swore fluidly, and slammed the door again.

"— sorry," she said. "Need any help?"

" _No_ ." He pushed himself halfway up, bit back a really embarrassing whimper, got both legs on the ground, and hauled himself up with the help of the toilet and the doorknob. 

He managed his shirt and underwear, but realized struggling into his jeans in this tiny space would be a complete disaster. This day just kept getting better and better. He retrieved the crutches from the other side of the door, collapsed on the bed, and started the process of getting his damn pants on.

Agent Christopher glanced at him, then away.

"What?" he snapped. "You want me to wear a kilt?" He'd worn a pair of shorts back in Florida, but they were abandoned or packed—

He was an idiot. He flicked his knife open, and two minutes later, had made his own shorts. They were taking pains to keep him out of sight, so no one would have a chance to notice his memorable bandages, anyway.

Agent Christopher swept the room one last time, grabbed her bag and his own, and held the door for him. Then she helped him drag himself into the back seat, and they pulled out onto the highway.

He closed his eyes, adjusted his gun to a more comfortable spot, leaned back against the door, and braced himself for another day's travel.

#

She thought she was tired enough to sleep through whatever noise Grace made.

She was wrong.

When she woke for good the next morning to broad daylight, she reached for her phone to text Denise asking her to bring earplugs, and saw that it was five forty three. Ugh. Should she ask for blackout curtains as well?

Still. Air conditioning,  _two_ bathrooms, and even a dishwasher.

They all drifted into the living room by midmorning. Wyatt looked even worse than Lucy felt, with bags under his eyes. He was carrying Grace; she was sleeping, for now.

"Okay," Jiya said. "Would someone like to explain how Wyatt has an infant when Jessica was definitely not that pregnant when she kidnapped me three months ago?"

"We figured out all those trips to Iowa," Lucy said. "We think Emma's been rescuing people from the past. In exchange, I assume, for their loyalty. 1930s Iowa is where she's been stashing them to... train. Age. Get used to modernity, slowly. Jessica... must've spent some months there."

"What do you mean,  _rescuing_ people?"

"She keeps... taking people that were supposed to die. The Lost Company. Schoolchildren. She seems to be focusing on people who died out of sight, whose bodies were never found, possibly to avoid disturbing history more than she has to." Emma didn't give a damn about preserving history, but she wouldn't want to accidentally change something and then discover it had a big, unexpected effect in the present.

"She's recruiting an army?" Connor sounded disbelieving. "From  _history?_ "

"History's lost souls," Lucy said after a minute. It was pretty smart, in fact.

_Why_ hadn't Lucy just aimed better?

"So— what, do we try to stop her?" Jiya demanded.

" _Technically_ , all these people are supposed to die," Connor said, glancing at Lucy when she didn't say anything.

"There's supposed to die, and then there's supposed to die," Lucy muttered.

"I mean, what if she starts going after, I don't know, lynching victims?" Jiya added.

"She can't."

They all looked at Wyatt.

"Lynching was a public spectacle. Public torture. It was all about the body. If she really is trying to keep the changes to a minimum, then... that doesn't fit."

Lucy was taken aback. Most people didn't—

He gave her a mirthless smile. "I told you. I know Texas history."

"She has made at least one change," Lucy said after a minute. "I think. There was this little township outside of Boston that had a different series of sheriffs when we got back from 1850. The jail caught fire not long after in both timelines. I bet she thought she could safely take people from there. But someone must've noticed they were missing."

"At least that explains how she trained another pilot so fast," Jiya said after a minute. "She sent them back to the '30s and picked them up when they were ready."

"How could a pilot train in the 1930s? There's nothing to train  _with_ ," Connor said.

"Emma had rigged up a lot of equipment in her cabin in Missouri," Lucy told him. "If they were building an off-grid bunker anyway, they could easily have set up a simulator."

Wyatt looked up. "So... she could have more than one pilot."

"You can't train just anyone," Connor said. "They have to be very smart and have a strong aptitude for physics—"

"But yes," Jiya said. "She could."

They looked at each other. Lucy wondered if they would one day look back at this as the moment they started to lose the war.

"If we can find her in the present, we have a window to strike while she's recovering," Wyatt said. "How long will it take to get all the equipment set up again?"

So they spent most of the day doing that. Well, three of them did; an hour in, Lucy told Wyatt to go back to bed and sleep when his daughter did. He was so tired he wasn't much help, anyway.

In the middle of the afternoon, when they reached the part that needed technical expertise and not just moving stuff, Lucy went for a walk. They were surrounded by miles of short, waving grass and grey-green scrubby bushes, interrupted here and there by patches of pale dirt or a low cactus. A line of low pale crags stretched out near the horizon, and the cloudless sky was an intense blue like Lucy had never seen before.

It was quiet and alien, and it was peaceful, but the gun she'd taken pressed against her ribs, reminding her of the war with each step. As she walked, she tried to trace back the steps that had led her from just a normal professor at Stanford to... this.

_I know what you're really meant to be, Lucy_ , Garcia had told her, at that first, startling meeting, against the burning  _Hindenburg_ .  _And it's not a teacher_ .

What frightened her the most, thinking back over the last year, was that she couldn't point to  _one time_ where everything had changed. One moment had led to the next. Smooth, imperceptible.

Would she even recognize herself when this was over?

It didn't— it didn't matter. Whatever it took, to take down Rittenhouse.

Right?

She went back inside, and helped Connor set up the simulator. Then she threw herself into run after run, trying not to die  _just once_ .

Mid-evening, they heard a car door slam. Lucy slipped through the house, in case—

It was Denise and Garcia.

Lucy's shoulders dropped, releasing tension she hadn't noticed until then. She hurried out to help them unload. She took the duffel bags from Denise as Denise took grocery bags out of the trunk, but her attention was on Garcia, struggling out of the backseat. She put the bags down, got the crutches out of his way, and held them where he could grab them as he hauled himself up. Finally, he turned and looked down at her, and—

— and he looked grim and pained, but it startled her to see tension drain out of him, too.

Lucy suddenly realized they'd been standing there for a few seconds, and looked up just as Denise studiously glanced away, her lips twitching. Lucy scooped up the duffels again. "Do you, uh, you need any help?" she asked him.

"The door. Please."

Among the things Denise had fit in the trunk was a stack of four pizza boxes. So they gathered in the living room, all together again for the first time in, what, a week? No, longer than that; Denise hadn't been there at the attack. Grace interrupted almost as soon as they had started, sending Wyatt to the kitchen to make up a bottle. Then she took periodic breaks from drinking to shriek about... no one had any idea.

Denise swallowed a bite. "Look at it this way, Wyatt. The biggest risk with preemies is that their lungs haven't fully developed. She's just reassuring you."

"Great," Wyatt muttered. "Wonderful."

"Don't worry," Garcia said. "The rest of us are equally thrilled."

The two men looked at each other for a minute. It occurred to Lucy that Garcia would know what they were in for better than any of them except Denise—

— and that the last time he'd lived with an infant, it would have been Iris.

Maybe Wyatt realized that, too, or maybe he'd just gained some common sense in the last few weeks, because he didn't say anything.

"So." Jiya sounded tired. "What now?"

"Now," Denise said, "we get everything running, we find out where the Mothership is—"

"Already did that," Connor said. "Still in the present. In New York."

"— and we wait for Rittenhouse to jump."

Lucy glanced at Garcia, waiting for him to again suggest taking the offensive, but he was focusing on his plate. Was that still his first slice?

It was Jiya who said, "We think we're going to win this war by waiting?"

Denise looked at her. "What are you suggesting, Jiya?" she asked quietly after a minute.

Jiya hesitated.

" _I_ have an idea," Connor said, when she didn't answer. "Look, Rittenhouse found us in Florida because—"

"Because I was careless." Lucy stared at the table before forcing herself to look up and meet their eyes.

Connor frowned at her. "No, because they broke through my firewall. Did you honestly believe I left our Internet access completely unprotected?" He looked around at all of them. Indignation spread across his face. "Dear God, you  _did_ ."

"Hey, I knew there was a firewall." Jiya raised her hands in the universal gesture of  _don't look at me_ .

"What's a firewall?" Lucy asked.

"It's... a virtual security barrier between a computer, or a group of computers, and the outside world," Connor said. "Every corporation and institution has them. It's supposed to keep snoops out of your system. When I set ours up, I overestimated how much had changed after Emma hid herself in the 1880s. She must've remembered more than I expected."

"Or maybe the NSA got more information on how you work than you thought, when Rittenhouse was running the show," Jiya pointed out.

Connor nodded once. "Or, maybe Rittenhouse made attempts I wasn't aware of when we were in the bunker, and learned that way. Anyway. The point is, they found us once that way, and we can expect they'll try again, which means we can trap them."

"How?" Wyatt asked.

"I can make— well, think of it as a second, decoy firewall in front of the real one. Weaker, but not  _so_ weak Emma will be suspicious. That's the easy part. The hard part is, picking a place we want the IP addresses to trace back to. Selecting the trap." He looked at Denise. "We'll need you for that."

"We could plant other clues, too," Wyatt said slowly. "Next time we jump, maybe. I mean, sure, I'd love to kill them all on the next mission and  _end_ this, but... that's not happening."

Connor looked at Lucy. "You could help us come up with evidence."

"Me?"

"Isn't that part of what historians do? Use a person's surroundings to learn more about them? You know, like that BBC podcast?"

Lucy opened her mouth.

"You can reverse engineer the process," he added.

"That's not history, that's archaeology, but yes, I can try."

The conversation turned into Denise, Connor, and Wyatt discussing tactics and to what secret government bunker they should lure Rittenhouse. Jiya disappeared into the Lifeboat garage. Lucy cleaned up. "I put your stuff in one of the bedrooms," she told Garcia softly, and offered him a steadying hand when he levered himself out of his chair.

She grabbed his duffel and led him down the hallway. "If... you want to stay here," she added hesitantly. If they wanted to maximize their space she would double up with Jiya, and— they'd been talking about their sleeping arrangements, in fact, when Rittenhouse had interrupted them.

She glanced over her shoulder at him.

"Are you seriously suggesting I'd rather room with Mason than you?" That was the closest thing to a smile she'd seen on his face since the attack.

Something tight eased in her chest as she shrugged. "Just checking."

It was also the closest thing to a smile she saw on his face for a while.

Of the rest of them, she thought only Denise might have any idea what a bad place Garcia was in right now. But she left after two days, going to Reno to start building the fiction that they were hiding out there. Jiya and Connor were working hard on what they'd come back from Florida calling the Time Warp. Jiya, apparently, had had a breakthrough while they were hiding out in the past... and that was still  _all_ she would say about that trip. And Wyatt was busy with Grace. He did get better at figuring out when she was going to be hungry, so she didn't subject them all to her wails of  _my stomach is very,_ very _empty._

Garcia slept most of the time. He limped out to the living room about once a day for a change of scenery. She brought him food whenever she ate or made something, and he usually ended up asking her to put it in the fridge. Because he was rarely awake, they didn't talk much. He was healing, she knew, which was exhausting. But when he  _was_ awake—

Whatever this was, it was more than the pain.

Four days after his arrival, they were awake at the same time: she was getting ready for bed, and he'd just taken a shower. As a friendly overture, she offered him the bag of dried figs she was snacking on— Denise must've stopped at one of the grocery chains beloved of hippies and coastal elites, because they were all stocked up on food like that.

He looked at her knowingly, but took one and slowly nibbled on it.

She waited until he was done to ask, bluntly: "What is it? Is it having Grace here?"

He paused in easing himself down on the bed, looked at her, shook his head, and kept going.

"Then what?"

He took his time answering, and it wasn't just the effort of getting semi-comfortable. "I have a job to do," he grunted. "I can't do it like this."

Lucy sat on the edge of his bed, forcing him to look at her. "Look me in the eye," she said, "and tell me you didn't get shot because you were buying me time to escape."

He met her gaze reluctantly, but didn't try to lie to her.

"You probably saved my life," she told him. "And we all have the same job."

He looked down, and licked his lips. When he looked up again, his gaze was intense. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "You know what I've done, Lucy. If we don't take down Rittenhouse— it's all been for  _nothing_ ."

"We're going to win," she told. "We'll  _win_ this, Garcia."

He closed his eyes, sighing softly.

"When you said we were both geniuses, were you lying to make me feel better?"

"Of course not."

"Then how can you think you can't contribute anything besides muscle?"

"Because I can't  _think_ on these painkillers."

"You'll be off them soon."

"You saved my life, too, you know," he said after a minute. "Shooting Emma."

She shook her head. "If I'd aimed better—"

"Lucy." He rarely interrupted her, but now, despite his exhaustion, there was a familiar depth at the corners of his mouth as he looked up at her. "If I stop beating myself up about being useless, will you stop beating yourself up about not killing her?"

"You've got a deal," she said after a minute.

"All right." He settled back and closed his eyes.

She looked down at him. "Hey," she said quietly.

"Mmm?"

"I'm glad you're here."

He cracked his eyes open and looked at her, expression startlingly soft. "Been a while since I heard that," he managed drowsily, before his eyes closed again.

She got off his bed to let him sleep.

#

Slowly, they settled in to a routine. Slowly, they grew less on edge in the new place. Lucy still made Connor double-check her computer before she went on the Internet the first time.

"Lucy, it's not— that's not how it  _works_ ," he tried to explain. "The firewall is associated with the modem."

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him until he sighed and humored her.

Slowly, Garcia spent more time awake, and that drawn look left his face. Denise came back to take him to Rapid City to check the progress of his leg, because she didn't think Lucy and Garcia would be safe enough, and Wyatt couldn't leave Grace that long. Garcia came back looking dour, but that wasn't a surprise.

Lucy split her time between research and the simulator. The first time she managed to land the "Lifeboat" without dying, she shouted so loudly she woke Grace. Wyatt came running out, sleepy and disheveled and juggling his unhappy baby, to make sure everything was okay. Chastened, she wandered into the kitchen.

Garcia was leaning against the counter, all his weight on his good leg, putting together— she blinked at the sheer size of that sandwich. His appetite had come back with a vengeance when he'd stopped taking the strong painkillers.

He glanced over his shoulder. "Did you survive?"

"Yes. Sit down, I can do that."

"Lucy—"

She pulled out the nearest chair. " _Sit_ , Garcia."

He looked at her, sarcastic and wry and amused all at the same time, like he was so good at. He piled everything on the plate and limped heavily to the chair with one crutch, wincing. "Do I get a treat?"

Lucy sat down and just watched him as he finished assembling his lunch, then started to eat. After a few bites, he raised his eyebrows and swallowed. "What?"

She shook her head. "It's just..." She hesitated. "It's good to see you up and around," she said finally.

He looked startled, then gave her a soft little smile before he kept eating.

After he'd finished, she sat with him in the part of the living room that opened onto the deck. For him, it was a convenient halfway point between kitchen and bedroom... and she was pretty sure standing up like that had been a bad idea, though he wouldn't admit it if she asked. For her, it was a chance to enjoy her victory in the simulator a little longer before she tried again and died again.

She stared out back. The house in Florida had been so different from the California landscape she'd known all her life: that part of Florida was a low, flat, sandy land, dotted with scrubby little trees, and creeks and ponds, stretching out under an enormous horizon. This part of the world was equally different from Florida and California. Huge expanses of prairie broken by the occasional butte. Flat like Florida, dry like California.

She glanced over and realized he was asleep.

She smiled, resisted the temptation to brush that one chunk of hair out of his face, and went back to the simulator.

#

Rittenhouse jumped.

Jiya had been expecting that. She still resented having to stop work on the Time Warp now that she finally had something going. Having to recalibrate the targeting system by hand after a crash landing in 1836 had been surprisingly, ironically, insightful.

Flynn limped in after Denise: great, they were all there. "Memphis, May 18 th , 1892."

Everyone looked at Lucy.

"Memphis was in turmoil after the lynchings of three black shopkeepers in March," Lucy said. "Mid-May is shortly before the  _Free Speech_ is destroyed by an angry white mob. That's Ida B. Wells's paper."

"Ida B. Wells?" Wyatt asked.

Jiya knew this one. She'd done a report on her for school once. "She was a journalist and an anti-lynching activist."

Lucy nodded. "Most people don't remember her now, but she exposed how common lynching was becoming, how  _brutal_ it was, and why it really happened. Not only to this country, but to England, too."

"So, Rittenhouse wants to kill her along with her paper?" Wyatt asked.

"The paper's not attacked until..." She frowned. "Let me check something," she called as she went back into the house.

Jiya looked at Wyatt. "Are you coming?"

He frowned. "Yes."

"So what about Grace?"

He looked like a man deeply disgruntled by the presence of an oncoming train. He glanced at Denise. "Can you...?"

"Wyatt, I have to leave in a few hours. You might not be back."

"I thought you were looking for someone."

"I  _am_ looking for someone. The overlap between people with the necessary security clearances and people competent to look after newborns isn't  _high_ , even before you add in needing someone we're  _positive_ isn't Rittenhouse."

"But—"

"I can."

Wyatt froze. "Oh  _hell_ no," he said, before he even turned all the way around.

"I'm competent with newborns." Flynn had a pained look on his face. "I'm already here, and I'm  _definitely_ not Rittenhouse."

"You're not  _touching_ her."

"Are you letting Jiya and Lucy go alone, then?" Denise asked.

Wyatt opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked around for a solution.

Flynn stared at Wyatt impassively. The silence stretched out.

Finally, Wyatt stalked over to where Flynn was sitting. "If you hurt her," he said quietly, well into Flynn's personal space, "I'll spend the rest of my life hunting you down and  _killing_ you as slowly as I can. Lucy won't save you. Agent Christopher won't save you. Knowing what's coming to me  _definitely_ won't save you."

"I'd expect no less."

Wyatt stared down at him, which didn't seem to fluster Flynn at all. He walked away—

— then turned back. "And if you fail her like you failed _your_ daughter," he growled, "you better _hope_ you die in the attempt—"

"Wyatt!" Denise said.

" _Wyatt!_ " Lucy bit out from the doorway.

"Agreed," Flynn said, face impassive.

Jiya had seen Lucy angry before, but never... incandescent with rage. " _Outside_ ," she snapped to Wyatt.

Jiya looked away, because looking at Lucy just then was startlingly close to staring at a lightning bolt. Then she glanced at Flynn, who—

Didn't look upset. Or even surprised.

Yeah,  _that_ wasn't heartbreaking or anything.

Denise went to stand by Flynn. "Are you okay with this?" she asked quietly.

"We don't have another choice."

"That's not what I asked."

"Yes," Flynn growled. "I'm okay with this."

"Can you manage? Physically?"

Some days, now, Flynn used just one crutch, some days he leaned heavily on a cane. Neither were optimal for carrying around a baby. But he nodded once. Well, if worst came to worst, Connor would be there to help with that part.

Denise studied him. "You know you didn't fail her."

"With all due  _respect_ —  _you_ don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"All right," Denise said after a minute, tone even, not agreeing but not pressing the issue.

Jiya heard increasingly raised voices from the house. No, actually, just Lucy.

"— didn't even believe she  _existed_ —" Something indistinct. "Willing to  _let her grow up in_ —"

"Should someone...?" Jiya began.

"I'm on it," Denise sighed, and went to make sure they didn't have casualties before the mission even started.

The three of them returned a moment later, Lucy still steely with rage, Wyatt looking chastened. He glanced at Flynn, then away.

"So," Connor said, with the air of one smoothing something over. "Do we know what Rittenhouse is after?"

Lucy held up an opened book. "The  _Free Speech_ was destroyed on May 27 th , ostensibly over an editorial it published on the 21 st . But Ida wasn't actually there for either event. She was in Philadelphia."

"... what would they have done if she'd been there?" Jiya asked.

Lucy looked at her. "The editor of a local white paper, when he thought the editorial had been written by Ida's male business partner, said he should be staked out in the middle of town, branded with a hot iron, and castrated."

A loud silence.

"So we need to stop them from keeping her off that train," Lucy finished.

"Should we... try to protect her paper?" Jiya asked.

Lucy didn't reply for a long moment. "I don't... know how to answer that. When they destroy the  _Free Speech_ , she moves to New York City, then Chicago. Her work gets even more exposure and she publishes a report on lynchings all over the country." She shook her head slowly. "I don't know what happens if we change that. I mean, this editorial was just an excuse for white Memphis to run her out of town after everything she'd been publishing on lynchings."

"So if they don't do it now, they might do it later when she's actually there?" Wyatt asked.

"... maybe."

"Right," Wyatt said. "What are we waiting for?"

#

"It... doesn't smell nearly as bad as Chinatown." And even though Jiya held her skirts protectively up an inch or two, the streets weren't dotted with human excrement.

"Memphis put their first sewer system in the '80s after devastating yellow fever outbreaks," Lucy said.

Wyatt frowned. "Yellow fever's carried by mosquitoes. The Army figures that one out."

"But right now they think it's bad hygiene. Plus they also had a cholera outbreak before that."

"So... does the sewage system work?" Jiya asked. "Or are we going to, you know... catch yellow fever and die?"

"No, it actually worked. It got rid of a bunch of breeding places for mosquitoes, plus it was the first separated system in the country— it didn't carry storm runoff— so they had to flush it out every twenty-four hours, which also washed away the mosquito eggs." Lucy looked around appreciatively. "Plus they just started drilling deep wells for a city water supply. That's the last nail in yellow fever's coffin."

"Oh, good." Jiya had long ago realized that, while Lucy might not technically have a photographic memory— she said she didn't, and the Alamo story backed her up— her capacity for detail was astounding. What made her smart was being able to deal with everything she remembered, but her memory sure didn't hurt.

"Still... don't let anything bite you if you can help it."

_Great_ . "Sound advice for any era."

"What's the plan?" Wyatt asked. The wheels of a passing carriage threw up mud, and he deftly maneuvered Jiya to his other side. "Where do we find her?"

"Beale Street," Lucy said. "I have the address. But— this is  _really_ not a good time for white people to be wandering around asking for the editor of the most courageous and outspoken of the Black Memphis papers. If we're not careful, someone could make us the excuse for trouble."

"Okay, I'll go," Jiya said.

Lucy and Wyatt looked at each other.

"Trust me. I got a  _lot_ of experience with how white people this century view me. And they may not know  _what_ I am, but they're pretty sure I'm not one of them." People who'd never seen anyone like her before generally decided she was mixed race, maybe with some Native American ancestry. "I'll go with her to the station. You guys make sure it's safe when we get there."

"Here," Wyatt said after a minute. He took Jiya's reticule from her, reached into his jacket, and slid a small revolver into her bag.

"You're from Louisiana," Lucy told her. "When Bishop Turner of the A.M.E. heard you were coming through Memphis on your way to the convention in Philadelphia, he suggested you call on Miss Wells. You don't have a letter of introduction because you didn't think time would permit but at the last minute your plans changed."

"Louisiana. Bishop Turner. What's A.M.E.?"

"African Methodist Episcopal. They're the northern branch."

"Got it."

"Hang on," Wyatt said. He disappeared into a nearby shop, and returned a few minutes later with a small valise. "If you're on your way from Louisiana to Philly, you'd have a bag, right?"

Lucy smiled her approval of his attention to detail. That was a pleasant change from the cold fury she'd been directing at him earlier.

Once Jiya got directions to Beale Street, it didn't take her long to find the narrow office of the  _Free Speech_ . She knocked, waited, and let herself in.

She found the small room where a woman about her own age was sitting at a paper-covered desk, writing with a feathered pen. "Miss— Wells? Pardon me..."

Ida looked up. "Ma'am?" she replied, cool but polite.

"Um, forgive the intrusion. My name is— Jiya Marri. I'm— I'm on my way to the A.M.E. conference, and my— our pastor had a letter from Bishop Turner suggesting I call on you on my way through Memphis."

Ida gave her a doubtful look. " _You're_ going to the A.M.E. conference?"

"Yes. From Louisiana." She hesitated. "I— I know this is very unexpected. I didn't think my plans would permit me to stop, so I didn't, um, presume to write ahead. But the  _Free Speech_ sometimes makes its way down to us, and— I admire your writing very much. I'm... a teacher, but... but I wish I could write as you do."

Ida relaxed a bit. "I was a teacher." She drew a sheet of paper over whatever she was working on. "You're lucky you caught me here. I'm leaving for the station within the hour." She indicated the chair in front of the desk. "Please."

Jiya sat.

"I hope you don't think me rude," Ida added, bending over her work again. "I need to finish this to leave it when I go."

Jiya gave her a brief smile. "Of course. I know I've interrupted."

"Did Bishop Turner suggest you travel with me for safety?" Ida asked after a few minutes.

Jiya tried to answer as vaguely as possible: "That... may have been in his mind."

Ida gave her a very direct look. "You've heard of the murders we had here?"

"Yes." She looked down. "Yes."

"Three of our best men killed like  _dogs_ for running a successful grocery store." She shook her head. "Every white man of any standing in this city knew of the plan, and yet they pretend shock and concern over our exodus. Over their declining business, more like. We've been urging our people to go west," she explained. "To Oklahoma."

"Have the businesses been hit hard?"

"Six weeks ago I had the superintendent of the City Railway Company sitting in that very chair—" She pointed with her quill. "Asking me to explain to my readers that electricity was nothing to be afraid of, because he thought  _that_ was the reason for his declining ridership!"

Jiya didn't have to manufacture her look of  _are you kidding me?_

"I told the people to keep up the good work," Ida added.

Jiya continued to watch her work, and listened for any sign of Rittenhouse. Ida finished whatever she was writing and carefully blotted it, then set it aside, wrote two letters, sealed them, and addressed them. She stood, tidied her desk, picked up a small bag sitting in the back corner, and tucked what looked like a gun inside.

She saw Jiya watching. "I bought a pistol after our boys were lynched," she said. "I'd rather die fighting injustice than like a rat in a trap. If they come for me? I'll sell my life as dearly as I can."

Jiya was starting to realize her eighth grade social studies report had not done this woman justice  _at all_ .

#

Lucy glanced sideways at Wyatt as they hurried through the streets. She still couldn't believe he'd said that to Garcia. But— she needed to put that aside and focus on their mission.

"I still can't believe you said that to Garcia," she muttered about thirty seconds later.

Wyatt exhaled loudly. "Not one of my better moments, okay?"

"You think?"

"Look, Lucy... to you he's Garcia, and he..." A  _long_ pause. "Whatever. To me, he's still Flynn. Still the guy who shot me. Kidnapped you. Had Rufus shot. And I'm supposed to just hand over my  _daughter_ to him and be  _happy_ about it?"

"You really thought your alternatives were that, or  _taunt_ him about Iris's  _death_ ?"

"Like I said," Wyatt muttered. "Look, I'll apologize when we get back."

_Mission_ , Lucy reminded herself darkly.  _Mission mission mission_ .

They turned a corner. "There's the station." She nodded toward the building.

Wyatt took a look, then tugged her into a doorway. "Well, that's definitely Rittenhouse," he muttered.

She tried to look around him. "You recognize them?"

"No, but they're watching the street, so they're not waiting for someone to arrive, and they don't have any bags, so they're not waiting to leave."

"We have to distract them somehow."

"Are you sure they're not just here to kill her?" Wyatt asked.

"Letting her be killed by the mob would... have a  _lot_ bigger impact." Lucy hated to even think of it— which was a luxury, a  _privilege_ , Memphis's Black community didn't have. "But I'm sure that's their backup plan."

Wyatt took another look.

"I'll let them see me and lead them back to you," she suggested.

He shook his head. "Too dangerous."

"If  _you_ play bait, we won't have the element of surprise." Surprise! Delta Force! was a lot more intimidating and effective than surprise! A historian!

He set his jaw. "Be  _careful_ ," he told her after a minute. "And don't come back here. This is a terrible place for a trap. See that alley?" He pointed. "I'll be covering you from there."

She nodded.

"Try not to let them all show up at once. And here." He handed her a revolver.

"How many of those do you  _have?_ "

"I had two. Now I just have my pistol."

Lucy's heart raced as she approached the station. She saw the men Wyatt had described, four of them, two at each of the street side corners of the building. She tried to look nonchalant—

One of them glanced her way and saw her. Frowned. Took a second look.

Lucy turned and hurried up the street, trying to look as conspicuous as possible.

Her skin crawled knowing she'd exposed her back to people Emma had doubtless instructed to kill her on sight. She had to trust Wyatt to have her back, as she always had. When she heard running footsteps, she broke into a run herself, cursing all over again the misguided fashion sense that had produced bustles and corsets and the deeply warped gender roles that had made severely hampered female mobility an acceptable side effect.

She heard voices and commotion behind her, but she didn't stop. She skidded around the corner of the alley. Wyatt pushed her behind him. But he was smiling.

"What?" she whispered.

"Our friends back there? A cop stopped them for chasing you down the street." He listened. "They're really getting into it."

He stiffened—

Lucy heard a quiet footstep, and then a man came around the corner and Wyatt tackled him.

Lucy leapt backwards, leveling her revolver in their general direction but keeping her finger off the trigger because she couldn't get a clear shot at the man. The man was fast and strong— training with Garcia had made her able to recognize these things— but Wyatt quickly got the advantage of him. He kicked a modern pistol away from the man— Lucy grabbed it— Wyatt stepped back and leveled his own gun at the man.

"You're one of the soldiers Emma took out of Nebraska," Wyatt said.

The tall, sandy-haired, freckled man glared up at him. "She  _saved_ us," he corrected Wyatt. "You would've let us die. To preserve  _history._ " He sneered that last word.

"You're wrong," Lucy said. This man was young, mid-twenties at best, but unless Emma had kept her new army in the past for a lot longer than they thought, he'd be old enough to remember Lincoln. "I was there when President Lincoln was shot. And I tried to save him."

The man turned his attention to her. "And now you're working with the man who shot him."

"He has a point there," Wyatt muttered.

"And so what are you doing here?" Lucy asked the man. "Sending an innocent women to her death? Because she dared to object to a murder?"

The man looked away. "We're just keeping her off the train."

"You know what would happen to her," Lucy said quietly. "Don't you."

"This is war," the man said after a second. "There's always casualties."

"War?" Lucy asked. "Then what are you fighting for?"

"Easy. She saved my life. I'm fighting for her."

Lucy shook her head. "You don't owe her that. She saved your life so you'd become her cannon fodder. It wasn't altruism. You can walk away."

"Not exactly a selfless suggestion from you, though, is it?"

"Where's the Mothership?" Wyatt interrupted.

The man stared up at him, expressionless.

Wyatt's mouth tightened. He glanced at Lucy. "We need some priva—"

A footstep at the alley's mouth.

The man took advantage of Wyatt's split second of inattention and launched himself away from the wall. Lucy raised her gun— He slammed into her and shoved her towards Wyatt—

She and Wyatt almost collided. By the time he grabbed her to steady her and move her out of his line of fire, the soldier was gone. By the time they reached the end of the alley, he was out of sight.

Wyatt's expression was grim.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I should've—"

"Not your fault, Lucy." He glanced back the way they'd come, but there was no one there. Just an extremely ill-timed passerby, apparently. "Come on, let's get to the station and make sure his friends don't come back."

#

Jiya wasn't sure what to expect as they approached the station, and she made sure to put herself in front of Ida. But they got inside without a problem, and found seats to wait for the train. 

"You're a schoolteacher?" Ida asked after a few minutes.

Jiya nodded.

"Do you enjoy it?" She sounded dubious.

"It pays the bills."

"That's how I felt. I needed to support my sisters and brothers, and I knew it was that or menial work." Off Jiya's glance, she explained, "Our parents died in the yellow fever epidemic."

"I'm sorry," Jiya murmured.

"Thank you."

Jiya casually glanced around the station. Could that man be Rittenhouse? What about that woman? If they started shooting, Jiya would tackle Ida to the ground, and then...

"My father's friends wanted to split the family up," Ida added. "Send my little sisters and brothers to different families, my older sister to the poorhouse, and let me find my own way. But I knew our parents would turn over in their graves."

"So you... became the head of the family instead?"

Ida nodded.

"But you don't teach any more."

Ida's mouth twisted wryly. "Last year, we published an editorial calling attention to what poor conditions the colored schools had. I wasn't reappointed after that. That's when I had to make the paper pay in a hurry."

"And... you managed, clearly." Jiya glanced around again, and this time, spotted Lucy and Wyatt sitting in a dark corner. She made eye contact with Wyatt; he gave her a tiny nod. Well, that was reassuring, if uninformative.

"It was a relief, in some ways," Ida admitted after a minute. "When I was young—"

Had the two of them now reached the age of saying  _when I was young?_

"— I thought I was meant to be  _something_ . When I left school, I couldn't see the way clearly, any more. Now, it seems to have happened."

Jiya felt a flash of... she wasn't sure what the word was. Amazement? Respect? Anticipation? Because Ida had no idea how important she would eventually become.

A man gave Ida a dark look. Rittenhouse? No, that was more disdain than— "That man just gave you the stink-eye."

"The  _what?_ " Ida glanced up. "Ah. Mr. Graham." Her expression became so studiously neutral, she couldn't have made her distaste clearer if she'd printed it as a headline in her paper. "He  _used_ to be my suitor," she explained, as the man in question exited the station. "I don't know what's wrong with the men of this city that they have nothing better to do with their time than spread vicious rumors about a woman on her own."

_Men getting their undies in a bunch over an independent woman? Some things never change_ .

"Have you ever been east?" Ida asked after a moment.

"No," Jiya said, because it was safest. "Have you?"

"No."

Jiya looked at Ida's own small valise, much more battered than her own. "Do you travel often?"

"Sometimes. I just returned from Oklahoma. Visiting the exodusters. Some of the white papers are reporting that conditions are very bad for them out there— a transparent ploy to try to keep us from leaving." Her mouth twisted. "Without us, there's no one to wait on their tables and cook their meals, wash their clothes and nurse their babies, and yet not a man among them lifted a finger to save Tom and the others."

"Is that why you're thinking of leaving?"

"One of the reasons. And there's work to be done, elsewhere." Ida gave her a sharp look. "If I tell you about the work, will you be one of those who decries me for lifting my head and making a fuss?"

"Definitely not."

She looked away. "After the murders, I began to read every article I could find that reported a lynching. I always believed the lie that lynching was punishment for rape— brutal, but after all, who wants to defend a rapist? But rape is not even mentioned in the majority of cases. And when it is, it's often an obviously false accusation." Her mouth compressed into a stubborn line. "It's a transparent excuse to terrorize us. And I  _know_ it happens beyond the newspapers I can get my hands on. Someone needs to find the truth. And then someone needs to tell the country."

Jiya wasn't sure what to say to that.  _Don't give up, no matter what happens?_ Both patronizing and insulting.  _It'll be more important than you know?_ Basically mysterious gibberish. 

"Have I shocked you?" Ida asked, mouth twisting into something like contempt.

Jiya realized how long she'd been silent: "No," she said. "No. I just..." She hesitated. "You're incredibly brave, and I'm not sure what to say to you that won't sound like I'm talking down to you," she admitted finally.

Ida looked startled. "Well, it's necessary."

"I know."

They sat quietly for a few minutes. Then Ida opened her reticule and began looking for something, taking out a small book and a bundle of pink papers. Jiya grabbed them both before they could tumble to the floor. Ida found what she was looking for— her ticket— glanced at it, nodded, and tucked it away again.

Jiya offered her the book, which had some letters tucked inside. "'Macbeth?'"

"I bought this years ago for my elocution lessons," Ida explained. "I wanted a book to take for this trip and this one was near to hand."

"You... recite?"

Ida nodded. "The first thing I ever learned was Lady Macbeth's monologue. Would you like to hear it?"

"Very much."

So Ida began to recite. She spoke quietly enough that she didn't disturb the people around them, but very forcefully. Jiya knew that she should be paying attention for Rittenhouse, but she was totally engrossed. She knew that Ida's career as an activist had involved, would involve, lots of speeches, and now Jiya understand, firsthand, one reason she'd been so effective.

"Wow," Jiya said finally, when Ida finished. "That was really good."

Ida looked startled again, and gave Jiya a dimpled smile. "Thank you."

In the distance, a train whistle blew. Ida looked up, then glanced at her pocket watch. "That's our train."

A white man in a fancy waistcoat came in from the street and began scanning the room purposefully. He looked past Jiya and Ida without pausing, and... His gaze landed on Lucy and Wyatt.

Three men came in behind him. He got their attention, and they conferred quietly.

_Uh-oh_ . "Let's go wait on the platform." Jiya stood and grabbed her bag as the men started towards Wyatt and Lucy.

"Why?"

"It, um, fresh air before we're cooped up in the cars." Jiya started determinedly towards the door, and hoped Ida would follow.

She did, protesting, "It's going to be a lot dustier out there!"

Jiya urged Ida through the door ahead of her as more men converged on Jiya's teammates. She heard Wyatt's voice, "... don't want any trouble..."

Another whistle and the sound of the train slowing covered whatever else he said. But in a minute or two, the conversation got heated enough that she could hear an angry voice through the open door, over the sound of the steam: "... tired of jumped-up Northern reporters coming to our city to stick their noses where it doesn't belong..."

Jiya willed the train to hurry up. Or rather, stop faster.

They called for passengers to board. "Go," Jiya told Ida.

Ida gave her a puzzled look. "What about you?"

"My friends are in trouble. I have to stay," she said quickly. "Look, whatever you do, don't get off the train before you leave the South, all right? Whatever happens. Go. Hurry!"

Ida looked even more confused, but hurried to board when the call came again. Jiya watched her, and scrutinized the other passengers getting on board. If only Rittenhouse came with Sharpie on their foreheads that said, "I'm evil!" It would make their lives  _so_ much easier.

The last call came. Jiya heard shouting from the waiting room. The train doors closed— slowly, the train churned into motion.

The next stop wasn't until Nashville. If Rittenhouse wanted her now, they'd have to stop the train. Jiya wouldn't put that past them—

Behind her, she heard the unmistakable sound of a punch.

She turned and bolted into the waiting room. Three men were trying to bring Wyatt down, another two were trying to hang on to Lucy, and through the windows, Jiya saw a big group coming their way. Wyatt slammed his fist into one of his attackers and shoved a second into the wall—

The third pulled a gun. A twenty-first century pistol.

Jiya grabbed an empty chair and swung it into him. His shot went wide and lodged in the wall. Wyatt fired— the man flinched and stumbled back—

Lucy drove her boot into the foot of one of her attackers. Jiya kicked the man Wyatt had just shot, wrenched his gun out of his hand, and slammed it into the head of Lucy's other attacker. "She's on the train. Come on!"

#

It took them until nightfall to lose their pursuers.

They fled on foot, then by streetcar, then by mule, and finally holed up in a ramshackle barn well outside city limits. It definitely wasn't safe right now to sneak back to the Lifeboat. The searchers were still out there, and they were  _angry._ The three of them would have to wait.

A mosquito whined near her ear. Jiya smacked it. Then another. And another. "So, uh, what are the symptoms of yellow fever exactly?"

"Fever, chills," Wyatt said. "Feels kinda like the flu, until you start bleeding and turning yellow."

"... what?" Jiya looked at him.

So did Lucy.

He shrugged. "Been a lot of places."

Jiya had been more focused on the  _bleeding and turning yellow_ part, but okay.

Another mosquito buzzed her. She swatted it with the papers out of her reticule— Ida's bundle of pink papers, now that she thought about it. She glanced down, and hoped it wasn't anything important. It was—

"Oh my God," Lucy said. "Is that—"

"The  _Free Speech_ ?"

Lucy's eyes got big and excited.

"... I was hanging out with Ida B. Wells," Jiya said. "This was a pretty foreseeable outcome."

"We don't have  _any_ copies of her paper. Can I—?"

Jiya really wanted to keep her mosquito swatter, but she gave in to Lucy's excitement and handed it over. It was... it was nice to see her excited. That reminded Jiya of the Lucy she'd known before... a lot of things.

Lucy carried the paper over to the door and tried to read it by the light of the waning moon as she absentmindedly swatted mosquitoes on her neck. Jiya closed her eyes and dozed.

She woke to Lucy asking, quietly, "What is it?"

"That guy I shot," Wyatt said after a minute. "He wasn't a trained fighter. Not like the rest of their agents."

"And he was from our time," Jiya said.

Pause. "How d'you know?" Not an argument, from Wyatt; he genuinely wanted an answer.

"State of his hands. His teeth. He'd had experience with modern orthodontia."

"You noticed all that during the fight?" Lucy sounded impressed.

Jiya opened her eyes. "I learned to notice a lot of things in Chinatown."

"So, if he was from the present and he wasn't there to shoot..."

"... he's the pilot," Lucy finished.

"I got him pretty good. If he dies, they're stranded here. We go home, come back, pick up some C-4, and the war's over." Wyatt sounded hopeful.

A long pause. "I can't imagine that." Lucy's voice was barely audible.

Wyatt made a concerned face and a soft noise. "Hey." He tugged her into a hug, gently, giving her plenty of room to refuse. "We're gonna win this thing, all right?"

Lucy nodded. But Wyatt couldn't see her face; Jiya could. She looked... lost.

Jiya watched her.

"And we're gonna get Rufus back," Wyatt added, looking in Jiya's direction.

She looked away, because she knew he was trying to encourage her, but...

She swatted another mosquito.

She thought about Ida's bravery.

Jiya hadn't been doing everything she could to win the war. She hadn't tried to have a vision since— since before the second Lifeboat had appeared. It just— it  _hurt_ , to see across time and space and not see Rufus  _anywhere_ .

But just because it hurt wasn't... an excuse.

"Can one of you, uh, spot me?" she asked abruptly.

"What do you need us to do?" Lucy asked.

Jiya lay back, and sank out of the present.

Bombarded with colorsoundshapefeel—

Ghostly images rushing past—

The time stream dragged her along— she hadn't done this in so long that—

Buffeted, tossed, pulled—

Her eyes snapped open.

She focused on breathing. She focused on the feel of the dirt under her butt, under her palms. Wyatt's jacket wadded up under her head. On the smell of distant fires and old hay. On the sounds of the crickets. On the stars, visible through the barn door, brighter than any she'd seen in the modern day.

Gingerly, she sat up.

She'd forgotten how it sometimes left her with what felt like a time hangover. She felt sluggish, groggy.

"Are you all right?" Lucy asked.

She nodded slowly, trying to process what she'd experienced into something coherent. She was out of practice. "I saw a man from the train station," she said slowly. "The one coming with reinforcements. Tall. White. Skinny. Blond hair."

Lucy and Wyatt exchanged looks. "Sounds like one of Emma's men," Lucy said. "The one the police didn't catch."

"We talked with him earlier," Wyatt added, grimacing.

"I saw him— I saw him in an old-fashioned Army uniform. And..." She hesitated. "California? I don't know when. And a modern city." She shook her head. "That's all."

"That's a lot," Lucy said. "If he's important, if Emma has something planned for him..."

Jiya nodded, tired, and slumped back down again. Killed three more mosquitoes.

Sleep didn't come. "What's the editorial Ida publishes?" she asked after a while.

"She wrote a lot about the lynchings, and then lynchings in general," Lucy said. "She discovered that rape was often used as justification—"

"She mentioned that." Jiya paused. "Figures that the only time in our history rape was taken seriously was when it was an excuse for racist terrorism."

Lucy made a sardonic noise of agreement. "And right after the lynchings, the white papers in the area condemned them, but as time went on and the city got more criticism from around the country, they started to get defensive. They blamed the victims, basically, and talked about 'chivalrous men' defending 'unprotected women.'"

"I thought you said this was about a grocery store," Wyatt said.

"It was. So Ida basically wrote that no one believed Black men systematically raped white women, and that if white men didn't stop going on about it, people would form their own conclusions about these liaisons and about the morals of white southern women."

Jiya's eyebrows went up. "What happens to her?" she asked after a while. "Later?"

Lucy sighed. "She elevates lynching to the public consciousness, but as time goes on, other, less radical groups become better known for it. People find her difficult to work with, so by the end of her life she's mostly excluded from the leadership of the movement she helped catalyze. She never really gets the credit she deserves." Lucy shook her head. "She  _was_ uncompromising. And she was hard on others. But they couldn't see she was often just as hard on herself."

"You should write a book," Wyatt said, staring at the ceiling.

"I've written four, but go on."

"About history's forgotten heroes. All these people you've met. Or almost met."

Lucy snorted. "Can you imagine the bibliography on that one? Reference: a trip I took in a time machine. Not sure if I'd be arrested first, or committed first."

Jiya dozed again. Wyatt slipped out to check the area and see if it was safe to leave yet. He came back maybe forty-five minutes later. "Still standing at the crossroads," he muttered. "They've gotta sleep sometime. We'll try to sneak out before dawn."

As the night wore on, Wyatt's calm wore off, until he was practically climbing the walls. "Wyatt, calm down," Lucy finally said, after he came back from checking the road for the third time in twenty minutes.

"Calm down? The sooner those dicks go home, the sooner  _we_ can go home."

"We've been stuck in worse places before. The Alamo? 1754?"

"Chinatown?" Jiya muttered.

Wyatt glanced at her, and toned it down a little. Just a little. "Yeah, but—"

"— but you want to get back to Grace," Lucy said.

Wyatt grimaced.

"She'll be fine, Wyatt. Garcia'll take care of her."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of," he muttered.

Jiya had no patience left for where this was going. She had  _negative_ patience.

"What does that mean?" Lucy demanded.

... yep.

"He wanted to kill John Rittenhouse just 'cause of his dad. What if he decides Grace is a  _threat_ because her mom is—"

"He didn't  _want_ to kill John Rittenhouse!" Lucy snapped. "He thought John was going to grow up to found a dynasty of pure evil, which, it seems like he kind of did, by the way—"

"Oh, so now you think that—"

"I was the one who saved John's life. I was  _there_ , Wyatt. You weren't."

And if Lucy had  _ever_ talked about that, about her time as Flynn's captive, Jiya sure hadn't heard about it. Clearly Lucy had been able to forgive him, or they wouldn't be... whatever they were. But just as clearly, from the look on her face right now, it had been some pretty substantial forgiveness.

Wyatt winced. "I know I—"

"Guys," Jiya said. "Really?"

That was  _all_ she had to say, which was nice.

She closed her eyes again. How long had it been since the train had left? Where was Ida now?

Jiya wished she could have warned her that this was the last time she'd see home for... Lucy would know, but Jiya knew it was a long time. Maybe forever.

You always expected life to go on as it had. You never thought that one day you'd wake up and you just couldn't go home again.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep again.

#

They didn't make it out at dawn. They had to hide until dusk. By the time they snuck back to the Lifeboat, the Mothership was back in the present. Wyatt scowled, but said nothing.

He was out of his seat and at the hatch while Lucy was still fumbling with her seatbelt. He jumped down and pushed the ladder up against the Lifeboat. Garcia had taken up residence at the Lifeboat console, his bad leg propped up on another chair; he was holding a tablet with one hand and rocking Grace, in her carrier on the floor, in the other. From her wails and his grimace, presumably, that had been keeping her content until just a minute ago.

She climbed out of the Lifeboat, awkward in her skirts, as Wyatt, perhaps prompted by Garcia's raised eyebrow, looked down at himself. At the very authentic 19 th century mud, blood, and...  _whatever,_ that dotted his clothes.

"Mind watching her for five more minutes?" he asked, stiffly.

"No."

"How is she?"

"Fine. She, ah, had a bottle about half an hour ago."

"Fine. Be right back." Wyatt practically galloped into the house.

"Did you touch anything?" Jiya demanded behind Lucy.

Lucy opened one of the laptops and searched for 'Ida B. Wells.' They'd had to hole up for so long, they hadn't been sure they'd stopped all of Rittenhouse's plans—

Pages of familiar-looking history appeared. Lucy slumped with relief.

"No, I didn't  _touch_ anything," Garcia replied. Pause. "Just keeping an eye on things." 

"I didn't let him," Connor called, emerging from the other half of the garage, dusty but triumphant, carrying a pair of circuit boards.

Garcia paused again, then shifted—

"I didn't say you had to  _move_ ," Jiya said in a gentler tone.

Garcia struggled to his feet anyway, leaning heavily on his cane and reaching for the carrier with his other hand.

Lucy beat him to it. "I've got her."

Garcia gave her a Look, but picked up the tablet instead, and let Lucy lead the way into the house as Jiya settled in with Connor to check all the details of their trip.

One advantage of living with two soldiers is that they were extraordinarily efficient in their showering—

Though Lucy had been prompted on more than one occasion, by more than one man, to consider whether they'd still be as efficient if—

Her face flushed.  _Anyway_ , Jiya was still in the garage by the time Lucy had collected her clothes, but even if she hadn't been and Lucy had invoked the pilot-showers-first rule, Wyatt was already  _out_ . Lucy watched him make a beeline for Grace, pick her up out of her carrier, and cuddle her, burying his nose in her scant hair.

Lucy had to look away for a moment. When she looked back, Garcia was watching her.

She stared right back. He'd looked better, and it wasn't just the pain. There was a weariness in his face that hadn't been there when they'd left.

Then Grace started crying, distracting them both. "All yours," Garcia told Wyatt with a smirk, and limped towards the kitchen. Lucy shut herself into the bathroom to marvel all over again at hot running water.

Another miracle had occurred by the time she was thoroughly clean: somehow, Connor, who couldn't cook, and Garcia, who couldn't stand, had managed to put food together. Reheated in the oven— forget half-decent, it was delicious.

"It was Mason's doing," Garcia said as they all sat around the table and ate. Connor smiled and looked startlingly humble— practically a first for him— and Lucy kind of wanted to have been a fly on the wall during this project, but mostly, she just inhaled supper.

After supper she kicked everyone else out of the kitchen and cleaned up. When she went back to their bedroom, Garcia was stretched out on his side in bed, ignoring the book open in front of him in favor of staring at the far wall.

His expression was so bleak that she hesitated a moment, picked up a book of her own, hesitated again, and asked, "Mind if I join you and read for a bit?"

He came back from wherever he'd been, and gestured at the bed with that innate courtesy that was so strange in... a killer. So she climbed in beside him, keeping to the edge to give him room. She read a page or two, looked at him again, and reached up to smooth his hair back, just a friendly, comforting—

"Don't."

She snatched her hand back like she'd burned it.

"I've been looking after another man's baby daughter for two days." His voice was guttural. "If  _you_ touch me gently, I don't think I can stand it."

Something twisted painfully near her heart, which just made her want to comfort him more. But he'd said no.

That feeling only intensified when, after a few minutes, he cautiously rested his head against her shoulder with an air heartbreakingly like that of a tired old dog creeping close to his master. She forced herself to focus on the book.

He read over her shoulder. "She  _bit_ him?"

"The conductor? Yeah." Lucy had picked up a biography of Ida; it seemed fitting. She was at the part where a train conductor had tried to forcibly remove Ida from her seat in a first-class car. She turned to the end to check what exactly the source was. "Ugh, end notes are for barbarians," she muttered.

He snorted softly.

Ah, there: Ida's own autobiography. Lucy flipped back to the page and finished it, then read another, and another, and...

"... Lucy?"

"Mmm?"

He was silent.

"Should I go?"

"No. Not unless you want to."

Lucy hesitated. "Did you— change your mind?"

He closed his eyes, and nodded, once, minutely.

She looked down at him. She committed the bibliographic sin of leaving the book facedown, open, on her stomach, and very carefully pushed his hair out of his face, running her hand across it. He shuddered. Then she wrapped her other arm around him and picked up the book again.

"Thanks," he whispered.

She looked down at him again, and felt herself half-smile. "Any time," she told him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: Kangaroo care is a real thing, not an invented excuse for our attractive cast to remove various pieces of clothing.
> 
> The billboard Denise references is inspired by one outside Sioux Falls.
> 
> Notes on Ida B. Wells:
> 
> Much of the story related here is taken from either her autobiography, her Memphis diary, or Linda O. McMurry's biography, _To Keep The Waters Troubled_. A few things I've invented, like the exact day on which Ida left for Philadelphia, which isn't recorded that I could find. I've also taken a few liberties; for example, Ida definitely took elocution lessons in the '80s but I don't know how well she kept up with it in the '90s.
> 
> Interestingly to _Timeless_ fans, Ida and other Chicago residents fought for more Black representation at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the same one featured in episode 1.11.
> 
> The _Free Speech_ was printed on pink paper so that illiterate buyers (who presumably were bringing it home to someone in the household who could read) could tell it from other papers.
> 
> One thing _Timeless_ does is sometimes omit period-specific manners or customs that would confuse the viewer (for example, see how often Lucy has her hair down when traveling in the past). It also often has historical figures improbably willing to trust the Team. Sometimes I take advantage of both traits of the show.
> 
> Finally, the danger in writing a chapter like this lies in the possibility of taking very real historical pain and using it for entertainment value. That was absolutely not my intention. My intentions were to show an important part of American history that, in my opinion, should be better-known than it is, and to share the story of an amazing and complex woman who worked nearly her entire adult life for justice, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.


	8. And It Feels So Good

The Mothership alarm went off four days later, in the middle of his physical therapy exercises.

"Central Kentucky, August 24th, 1922," Mason reported, when Garcia limped into the garage, the last one to arrive.

"Lucy?" Wyatt prompted, when Lucy didn't volunteer anything. His mouth was tight. Garcia knew he'd been hoping he'd seriously wounded the new pilot.

"... Let me check something." She hurried back into the house.

Jiya glanced at him. "Flynn?"

"Nope." He limped closer to see where in Kentucky the circle was centered. Even in the present day, there wasn't a lot there.

Lucy returned in a minute flipping through a hardback. "Could be... any one of a number of pretty improbable, obscure things." She listed a few possibilities.

He had to agree: none sounded like particularly attractive Rittenhouse targets.

"Great," Wyatt said. "Well, let's go run another mission without any leads."

"At least there's no blizzard," Lucy pointed out.

Wyatt looked at him. "You on deck with Grace again?" he asked, stiff and hesitant at the same time.

Garcia shrugged. "Get her stuff."

Lucy and Jiya went to look for suitable clothes they might already have, to save time when they got there. Wyatt came back with the diaper bag, Grace's carrier, and Grace herself. "Where do you want her bassinet?"

"Our room."

Surprisingly, Wyatt's hackles didn't rise at the reminder that Garcia was co-habiting with Lucy. Instead, he hesitated. "Look, I'm... sorry. For what I said before. About your daughter. It wasn't true."

Garcia gave him a less deferential version of what he'd said to Agent Christopher: "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Wyatt, surprisingly, did not snap back. "Yeah," he said, with a knowing look. "Always easier to think you failed them than that there was never any chance."

Garcia stared at him, speechless.

Wyatt shrugged, picked up Grace, and cuddled her. Garcia instinctively looked away.

The three of them left in the Lifeboat. Garcia pretended he wasn't going to worry. Mason was doing something with those equations. As the day dragged on, he occasionally checked on the two of them. That had been extremely unexpected, and a little awkward, the first time he'd done it on the last trip. But it saved Garcia some walking, so he... appreciated it. He supposed.

He tried to minimize the amount he had to touch Grace unnecessarily. Oh, he tended her just fine: fed her as soon as she was hungry and _before_ she cried, burped her after that, checked her diaper often, changed her as soon as it was wet, rocked her to sleep. There'd be no neglect on his watch— and he was arguably better at all of it than Wyatt, through longer—

Anyway. For any of those things, he could concentrate on the task _as_ a task. But beyond that...

For anything else, it was just easier if he thought of her as a baby-shaped robot.

In the early hours of the morning, her fussing woke him. He lay there for a moment, partially because he hadn't been asleep long at all and he was afraid he knew what she wanted, but mostly because walking hurt. But then he got up, got her up, checked her diaper, offered her a bottle, put her down in her bassinet when she refused the bottle, checked her diaper again...

"All right, all _right_ ," he muttered, picking her up again. "Calm down, fussy pants. You sound like your father." He held her rather gingerly to his chest and bounced her gently, which was not an easy proposition with his leg the way it was.

Slowly, she began to quiet.

He looked down at her, trying and failing abjectly to keep his emotions at bay. It cost him a pang to know that, if Jessica Logan had been less robust, less of a fighter, Grace would have died before birth and at his own hand.

She started crying every time he tried to put her down. What was it in the nature of Logans that predestined them all to be annoying stinkers? He limped with her out to the Lifeboat garage, where there was at least a couch for him to sit down on.

They reached a compromise: he could be still as long as he didn't try to let go of her. Damn it, it wasn't like she wasn't getting plenty of warm human contact each time he fed her. Apparently that wasn't enough for her.

He tried not to think about the last time he'd held an infant. If he failed, if he had to squeeze his eyes shut because of the oh-so-familiar warm weight and smell of her, no one was paying attention.

At least, while Wyatt was still doing— what was it called— kangaroo care? when he had the chance, Grace didn't _need_ that. Garcia... he couldn't have. He just _couldn't_ have.

He dozed...

She was thankfully still sleeping when the sound of Mason moving around the kitchen woke him. Garcia was familiar with Mason's routine: he wouldn't come out here until after his coffee and shower. Garcia looked down at Grace, and very, very reluctantly, admitted to himself how much he had missed this.

Which was really just glass in the wound, because she wasn't his child.

He stood carefully, because his good leg had fallen asleep. She fussed, then settled back down to sleep. He looked down at her, again, and bit back a sigh. Studying her, tiny wrinkly thing that she was, he could see how she might grow and grow up, what she might look like and act like as she got older, because he'd seen the whole process with Iris.

Until... age five, anyway.

If she'd lived, Iris would be _eight_. Even if he ever got her back, even in some utter fantasy world where he stayed involved in her life somehow, he'd never get those missing years back.

God. Sometimes Garcia wished he'd never— wished he'd turned a blind eye to what he'd found in those financial records. A moment of cowardice for a lifetime of peace.

But that thought hurt him, too, because he knew... he couldn't. Couldn't _really_ trade Rittenhouse the world— which is what they'd win without opposition— for his girls.

He closed his eyes, until Grace Logan, tiny human and seed of a much bigger future human, made a little discontented whining noise in her sleep, and drooled on his shirt.

He looked down at her. God, this hurt.

"Where'd they go?"

Garcia startled and instantly regretted it at the pain in his leg. _Not_ Mason in the kitchen. "When did you get here?" he snapped, to deflect from— being found like this.

"Maybe twenty minutes ago." Agent Christopher came into the room. "You were both sleeping. I didn't want to disturb you." Pause. "Want me to take her for a while?"

Garcia blinked hard and cleared his throat. "Well, she is ready for a change," he drawled, "so if you _really_ want her..."

He should have known by now that she would not be baited. "I'd be happy to." She came forward and gently took Grace out of his arms. "Who's a cute little stinker?" she chirped.

He had to turn away from the uncomplicated happiness of a parent who'd never lost a child.

"Where's the diaper bag?"

"Bedroom," he managed roughly.

"Whose?"

"Ours."

"Where's the _team_ , Flynn?"

"Central Kentucky, August 22nd, 1922."

"Why?"

"No one had any idea."

She seemed to accept this. "There's food in the kitchen," she told him as she headed into the house.

He regained some semblance of composure over coffee cake and coffee. Still, when Agent Christopher carried Grace out, he was glad the kitchen was dark.

She studied him anyway, with an unwelcome sober scrutiny. "I should've let you get your family back first," she said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"I hope that eases your conscience," he snapped, "because it doesn't do a _damn_ thing for them."

Still, he couldn't get her to hit back, _damn_ her. "I know."

He glared furiously up at her, aware that she could probably see the tears in his eyes. Was this what she'd wanted? Was she _happy_ now? To rub salt into that wound, bring the big, bad terrorist to his knees?

She had unshed tears in her own eyes.

He shot to his feet, was painfully reminded of his _physical_ wound, stumbled, grabbed his empty dishes, and put them down in the sink more forcefully than he meant to. He washed them one at a time, taking the time to get himself under control again.

"Go rest, Flynn," she suggested after an incredibly awkward silence. "I'll watch her for a while."

Between his weariness, his physical pain, and— everything else, she didn't have to press him. He limped back to his own bed. If he had to bury his face in his pillow for a few minutes before he fell asleep, no one knew.

#

Agent Christopher looked after Grace for most of that day, as they waited for the team to return. Garcia was more grateful than he'd let on. He'd agreed to do this— there was no one else _to_ do it. He'd keep Grace safe and healthy until her father got back. He was used to pain, and so much more so in this war, ever since—

— that night.

But still. He was grateful for the respite.

He had a checkup in Rapid City, which was why she'd come back in the first place, so they had to take Grace with them that afternoon. They were both on edge, because having an infant along made them a lot more vulnerable. But they sure as hell couldn't leave her with Mason. And in the end, they got back without a problem.

Agent Christopher tried to wait out the Lifeboat, but finally she had to leave again, that evening. "I know this is staggeringly inefficient," she admitted. "But there are some things I have to be in California for, and the more often I go back and forth, the more chances Rittenhouse has to find out where I'm going."

"If it's work things and not personal things," Mason said carefully, "we could put in an encrypted line. You could communicate with anyone, anywhere. You wouldn't want to— stay _all_ the time, but you could be here more often."

"What's your opinion of your own encryption abilities?" Agent Christopher asked.

Mason looked taken aback. "Is this about the firewall? I underestimated Emma, but I _could_ have made it—"

Agent Christopher waved that away. "And what's your opinion of Homeland Security's encryption abilities?"

"... ah."

The team still wasn't back the next morning. "They haven't been gone this long since _you_ stranded them in 1754," Mason muttered.

Garcia's trip for Emma had taken longer than this, but he didn't know when the team had picked up his trail, and, anyway... He really didn't need to remind anyone of that trip.

"And it's not like I can very well fly a team of archaeologists to the Lifeboat's location any more," Mason added.

Garcia frowned. "What?"

"That was the procedure in case of an accident in the past. Bury a message at a pre-specified direction and depth from the Lifeboat, and wait for us to dig it up." He paused. "Anthony didn't tell you? He seems to have told you everything else."

"It never came up." Insurance, perhaps, in case Garcia had broken his promise to let Anthony go back for the stranded Time Team after Rittenhouse was destroyed? A way to improve their chances of survival?

Garcia had known that Mason wouldn't leave his people stuck in the past if at all possible, that he would have tried to build another damn machine if necessary. The fact that that would have meant another machine _in Rittenhouse's hands_ had prevented that option from being Garcia's own insurance policy. Had given him an incentive to make sure they got home... eventually.

"I've always wondered why you let us find Anthony's body," Mason added, with a fake-casual glance over his shoulder from where he stood at the console. "Why you didn't just leave it to be destroyed by the explosives..." He trailed off invitingly.

How many times was he gonna have some variant on this conversation? First Rufus, then Jiya, now Mason. Garcia almost missed the days when (nearly) everyone had either hated or feared him too much to actually talk to him.

Almost.

Some.

Maybe.

"I assumed it was a threat," Mason continued, in an easy tone that did not for an instant disguise his fear.

So had Emma. Garcia hadn't explained to her, either, and now he was glad he never had. But there'd been no tactical advantage in keeping Anthony's death a secret, and... he knew what it was like, living in perpetual grief and perpetual hope, never sure if you'd see someone you loved again. Fresh off the pain of shooting his closest ally and confidant in this damned war, he'd seen no reason to force the surviving Bruhls through that hell any longer.

He turned pointedly away, and focused on convincing this needy little thing in his arms that her world wasn't gonna end if he put her down.

He was in the Lifeboat bay that evening when the subtle shaking gave him enough warning to shield Grace from the air blast, then tuck her in her carrier before they could open the hatch. He had an inkling how Wyatt might react to seeing Garcia cradling her so carefully. And, give the man his due, maybe he'd keep that reaction to himself. But maybe he'd take it out on Lucy.

Grace started fussing, of course, but he could blame that on the Lifeboat returning. Her world _definitely_ wasn't gonna end if she had to be content with being rocked in her carrier for five minutes while her dad cleaned off whatever authentic germs and bodily fluids he'd brought back this time.

Wyatt had a black eye. Lucy also had the beginnings of bruising on her face. "What was the target?" Garcia watched them carefully, but they were all moving easily enough that they weren't concealing any serious injuries.

"Never figured that out." Wyatt looked and sounded exhausted. "Never even saw them. Jiya stayed with the Lifeboat to avoid a repeat of 1754—" He gave Garcia a pointed look. "While Lucy and I ran around like chickens with our heads cut off."

"Denise still isn't back?" Lucy asked.

"You missed her yesterday," Mason said.

"How was she?" Wyatt scooped Grace up and tried to soothe her. So much for cleaning up. Well, he was building Grace's immune system.

"Fine. Took her bottles without a problem. I saved all her dirty diapers for your inspection."

Nothing. Well, if Wyatt rose less easily to the bait as a father, he was also much less brooding and prone to shoving his emotional problems at rest of them, so Garcia supposed he had to view it as a net positive.

Everyone showered and changed. Mason ran his Wikipedia comparison program. "Nothing."

" _Nothing_?" Lucy leaned tiredly against the couch.

"Well, there are some differences far down in the sig figs in rainfall totals for that area for the month after your visit, which is... fascinating if you think about the implications, but—"

"So, nothing," Jiya confirmed. "Emma was recruiting again?"

"It wasn't a populated area," Lucy pointed out. "She might have been able to save one or two lives, but there's no record of mass death or disappearances when we were there."

"Maybe it wasn't what they were doing there," Wyatt said. "Maybe they wanted _us_ out of the way. Any trouble while we were gone?"

Garcia shook his head slowly. Mason did the same.

"What would it have been?" Jiya asked. "They already know both our soldiers are... occupied, right now."

Wyatt didn't have an answer, but he didn't look satisfied.

"Maybe it was something small that didn't make it to Wikipedia," Lucy said. "I mean, don't get me wrong, Connor, that program you wrote is useful, but Wikipedia's _not_ the be-all and end-all of information." She stared at them with a strange, fierce look on her face.

"... what?" Jiya prompted after a minute.

Lucy looked taken aback, then frowned and relaxed. "Sorry. Force of habit. I was waiting for a student to argue."

"Something small like what?" Wyatt asked.

"Like... taking money back and investing it to give them a new war chest? Although six years before the Depression would be a strange choice. Like leaving something else for someone? Planting some kind of... seed that hasn't come to fruition yet?" She frowned again, clearly not satisfied with her own ideas.

"But if they're trying to change something that hasn't happened yet," Jiya said, "that suggests they know what's _going_ to happen."

"Well, last time we thought they had some idea about the future, we were wrong, and Emma was just stealing people out of the past," Wyatt said after a minute. "There's no point in worrying when we don't know. Maybe the Mothership glitched or something."

"The Mothership didn't _glitch_." Mason sounded offended.

"Or something. Maybe the pilot glitched. We've _shot_ both of their pilots—"

"— that we know about," Garcia pointed out. If Emma could train one pilot in the past, she could train more than one.

"I'll do some research," Lucy said. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack at this point, but."

#

One measure of his recovery was how he could move increasingly more quietly, with the cane. Now, he barely made a sound going down the hall. He didn't even disturb Wyatt, who was dozing on the living room couch with Grace snuggled against his chest.

Garcia glanced away as soon as he saw that.

He knew he wouldn't sleep again, he saw no point to staring at the bottom of the top bunk for hours, and he couldn't turn the light on to read without waking Lucy. So he'd come out here.

Lucy had returned from Memphis anxious to find the soldier she and Wyatt had fought with. Garcia had volunteered to help. Lucy had stacked every book they had in the house that she thought might be relevant, in order of priority. Garcia was helping her go through them. It was a long shot... but what, exactly, else was he doing?

The light over the stove was enough to read by. He propped his bad leg on a second chair, and settled in.

Perhaps an hour passed before noise from the living room intruded on his thoughts. A broken muttering that was too familiar. Garcia closed the book, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

He'd lived among soldiers, fighters, most of his adult life. There was a careful calculus to waking someone from a nightmare when you all had them habitually. Unless it was really bad, or you knew them really well... you didn't. You pretended you heard and saw nothing, just like they did for you.

But the infant with Wyatt changed the equation.

He limped to the living room. Wyatt, unfortunately, was neither stopping nor waking. "Wyatt," Garcia said quietly.

A groan.

Of course Wyatt wouldn't let him do this the easy way. " _Wyatt_."

Nothing.

Garcia crossed the room and sat in the chair. "Master Sergeant Logan!" he bit out, as softly as he could.

Wyatt's eyes snapped open. "Ah!" He surged upward— Garcia reached out for Grace—

Wyatt remembered himself and grabbed her before she could go anywhere. She protested sleepily, then nuzzled her personal heating pad again, apparently not caring that the chest she was resting against was heaving.

"Thanks." Wyatt's voice was guttural. It must've been bad if he wasn't even pretending to invoke the _should've ignored it_ code.

"Sure."

Wyatt looked down at his daughter. Every time, _every time_ , it hurt to see Wyatt with what Garcia had lost. But at least—

When Wyatt had gotten his wife back, he'd been, frankly, an ass about it. It had hurt to watch a man get a second chance like that and screw _around_ with it. At least Wyatt wasn't ever taking _this_ for granted.

"God, I could've—"

"Have you _met_ your daughter?" Garcia called the cops on this recrimination party before it could get started. "She has lungs like an alarm clock. She would've let you know something was wrong."

Wyatt gave him a knowing look. "Right," he said. "And you just woke me up out of the goodness of your heart."

" _She has lungs like an alarm clock_ ," Garcia repeated. "It's four am, and we're in a house with three other people."

"... oh."

"Uh, yeah." Garcia braced himself to stand.

"I get it now," Wyatt told him.

Garcia looked at him, and raised his eyebrows.

"When you told me... in 1972. I thought I knew what that must feel like, because I'd lost Jessica. But..." He looked down. "If they hurt her? I'd burn down the world, too."

 _God_ _damn it_. If he had to have _one more_ conversation on this subject... He lurched to his feet and turned away. "As far as I'm concerned, that conversation never happened." He remembered— telling Wyatt _something_ , but he knew it was different that Wyatt's own memories, and if he pretended—

"Uh-huh." Wyatt, nuisance that he was, sounded annoyingly unconvinced. "Next you're gonna tell me you don't remember us meeting in Afghanistan."

Garcia stopped. Turned. "We—"

He closed his mouth on the word _didn't_ , looked down at Wyatt, and thought. Remembered all the times he'd met Americans during that war.

"Late 2002," he finally said, slowly. Wyatt's look of getting far too much enjoyment out of knowing something Garcia didn't, faded. "Just outside Kabul. I was coming back from patrol. Your unit had just been ambushed on the road, and you found our outpost."

Wyatt nodded.

Garcia had never connected that young soldier, barely old enough to be there— and Garcia knew something about that— with Wyatt Logan, but he remembered the incident. "I'm surprised _you_ remember," he added. "You were pretty focused on your buddy." Pause. "He make it?"

Wyatt shook his head.

Garcia frowned. "How'd you figure it out?"

"Something you said when we were sparring. I realized I knew the place you were talking about. Then I realized I'd seen you there. Then I checked your file."

His _file_. Wonderful. "Just how many copies of that file are floating around here, anyway?"

"Oh, like you didn't read everything you could get your hands on about us."

Which Wyatt knew, because Garcia had, in one of his more regrettable moments, raised the specter of Wyatt's dad. "... fair enough."

Wyatt nodded to the book in his hand. "A little bedtime reading?"

"Lucy asked me to help her find that soldier." Garcia flipped back a few pages from where he'd left off. "Is this him?"

Wyatt looked. "That looks _nothing_ like him."

"Great," Garcia muttered.

"Bring me a pencil and some paper."

Garcia shrugged, and did. Wyatt also took the book, and, one-handed, produced a startlingly lifelike sketch of a young man. Who, he was right, looked absolutely nothing like the soldier in the photo Garcia had found.

Garcia looked from sketch to creator. "You're not bad."

"You're welcome," Wyatt said. "... what now?"

Garcia shrugged again. "There were some sketches in the journal. I always assumed they were by Lucy. One Lucy. Maybe not."

"... can Lucy draw?"

"I've never asked."

Wyatt shook his head. "I had no idea you knew _asking_ was the right way to learn things about people."

"I was NSA," Garcia reminded him.

"Mmm."

Garcia pushed himself to his feet again.

"... Flynn."

"What now?"

Wyatt hesitated. Then his words came out as a rush. "I know it can't be easy having her here. Thanks for not making a fuss about it."

That was just inducement to get the hell out of here even faster. "She makes enough fuss for ten," Garcia pointed out acidly as he limped out of the room. "If you wanna _thank_ me, stop thinking I want to _talk_ about it."

Wyatt nodded once. "Got it."

#

It took Rittenhouse a week to jump again, lending credence to Wyatt's glitch theory. At least this trip had a readily identifiable target: Lucy was pretty sure they were going after Cesar Chavez.

Wyatt brought Grace and her accessories when he hurried into the Lifeboat bay. "Bassinet's outside your bedroom." He paused. "Thanks, Flynn."

Garcia carefully took Grace. "I bet that was painful."

"I'll still kill you if you hurt her."

"I'm glad we understand each other." And they did.

Lucy, Jiya, and Wyatt piled into the Lifeboat. As it disappeared, he wished, desperately, he were going with them. He hated these damned trips, especially in the Lifeboat, which had been built for midgets. But they were his only chance to fight Rittenhouse, and...

... and he wanted to protect the team.

His only chance to protect the team, unless something went horribly wrong. They thought they knew how Rittenhouse had found them last time. But were they sure?

And if Rittenhouse showed up here, he wasn't sure he could get Grace _and_ Mason out alive.

Mason had been studying the monitors after the Lifeboat's jump. Now, as if his thoughts were mirroring Garcia's, he asked, "Would you really let Wyatt kill you? If something happened to her?"

Garcia looked at him.

"You _really_ wanna ask me that?" he said after a minute. "Now? When it's just the two of us in the house for God knows how long?"

Mason's eyes widened slightly. He went back to his work.

Garcia intended to keep looking for that soldier when he wasn't tending Grace, but he ended up dozing off whenever she did. He wasn't sleeping nearly as much as at first, but his body was making it clear that, no matter how hard he pushed with his PT exercises, he was still healing.

As if he didn't already know.

Next time Grace woke, Garcia made a circuit of the house and both garages, inside and out.

Mason eyed him when he limped back to the garage. "Something wrong?"

Garcia shook his head, concentrating on balancing child and cane. Nothing _wrong_. Just a— feeling, maybe, or normal unease from thinking earlier about Rittenhouse attacking. "You have a gun?"

"A _gun?_ No."

Garcia knew he knew how to use one, because he'd saved Rufus's life in 1936. "C'mere."

Mason's eyebrows went up, but he followed Garcia into the house and down the hall. He waited in the bedroom doorway as Garcia carefully put Grace in her bassinet and retrieved a spare pistol from the stash he'd accumulated over all these missions. He handed gun and magazine to Mason.

Mason looked at the things in his hands, then back to Garcia.

"Load it and keep it with you. With the safety on."

"I don't know how to load this." Mason sounded like Garcia had just suggested he balance on his head while juggling candles.

"I'm pretty sure you do." There was also the surveillance Garcia had done on him.

Mason gave him a surprisingly dark look, awkwardly started to—

" _Not_ in here," Garcia snapped.

Mason cleared his throat. "Right."

"If something happens, you take her, you get the hell out. Understand?"

"What about you?"

"Don't wait for me."

Pause. "You're not actually _required_ to die for the team, you know," Mason said, a little awkward.

"I'm not planning on it if I can help it, but if I know you've gotten her out safely, I'll have one less thing to worry about."

"Do you know something you're not telling me?"

Garcia looked at him.

Mason made an impatient gesture. "Something about all this take-the-gun-and-the-baby-and-run. Did you... see something out of place?"

"No," Garcia said after a minute. "Just a... feeling."

"A feeling," Mason repeated.

Garcia stared down at him until he got the hint and went away.

When Miss Ridiculously Fussy woke him around midnight demanding a bottle, she felt a little warm. Garcia frowned down at her as he fed her, but she seemed her usual self otherwise. He burped her, changed her diaper, and put her back down.

About an hour later, he jolted awake to the wailing of a truly unhappy baby. He got up fast and picked her up. She was definitely warm.

He limped out to the first aid kit, which was the size of a laundry basket and had more supplies than the entire medic's stock from some of his earliest campaigns. Grace's temperature registered around a hundred and one. Not a problem in an adult, but in such a young one...

He put everything away as he considered their options, none good. It was in that process that he found the baby Tylenol, and exhaled quietly. God bless Denise Christopher and her exhaustive thoroughness.

Then he read the bottle. Grace was too young to take it.

Damn it. He settled in the living room with Grace and tried to soothe her. She didn't want to be soothed. Her distress worried him even more than her temperature... but surely that was just from the fever, too.

Her temperature didn't climb, but it didn't drop noticeably, either.

He stood, and limped around the living room with her as he tried to think through the options. None of them were good.

"Shhh, shhhh," he whispered, bouncing her as he found and opened a laptop. Where was the nearest doctor?

Damn it. That far?

He could drive if he had to. But with Agent Christopher gone, the only vehicle here was the old pickup with farm plates used by the geologists, or whatever, who'd lived here last. If the police stopped him for that and discovered he was a fugitive, they'd all be in deep shit. He could drive out to the road, then hope that someone came along a deserted country highway who was willing to stop for a strange man in the middle of the night and give him a ride... or who could be easily removed from their vehicle. But then he'd have that same problem with the police.

But what alternative did he _have?_

It wasn't safe to send Mason. All it took was one person tweeting or whatever that they'd just seen the reclusive tech mogul, and Rittenhouse would have no trouble finding their new base. And if he did nothing?

Did Grace's whimpering sound different now, or was he imagining it? Different, and not better.

He paced the living room with her, barely noticing his own pain. Should he try to give her a bath, cool her down that way?

But she settled into an uneasy sleep against his chest. He didn't dare put her down, just sank gingerly onto the couch.

She woke within the hour. He changed her diaper, but she only took a few ounces of formula before she refused the bottle. Her cries took on a tone he didn't like at all.

A door opened. Mason shuffled out. Well, if he had a problem with this, he could just use the damn earplugs like everyone else.

"Is she all right?" Mason asked, frowning. Then he bent over the laptop. "'Hospital?'"

"How long would it take you to fabricate a Nebraska license plate?" Garcia demanded.

"Sorry, what?"

"A license plate. With the stuff in the machine shop. Don't tell me you couldn't do it."

"I— wh— fine, ah, it's not all set up... six, seven hours?"

"God damn it," Garcia muttered, then added some more fitting words in his father's native tongue.

"... Flynn?"

"No," he snapped. "She's not _all right_."

"How... not all right are we talking?"

"I don't know. But if you're seen anywhere near here, or I'm arrested, Rittenhouse is gonna find us." And this time they wouldn't take any chances. The team had gotten lucky last time— Emma hadn't expected Lucy being able to shoot, and hadn't expected their neighbor, either.

"All right, I'm calling Denise," Mason decided.

Garcia ignored him. She'd already warned them she'd be in D.C. to report to her superiors for the next two days and would therefore be harder to reach. He heard Mason call, and get no answer.

"All right, then I'm calling the drop."

The drop— the number that was supposed to have a way to reach Denise any time, night or day, when she was away from the team. Eventually. And that was the problem.

He didn't pay much attention as Mason left a message. Instead, he tried to calm Grace.

"Flynn, don't you think you should—"

"Either help," Garcia growled, "or _shut. Up._ "

There was a welcome silence, but he didn't hear footsteps, so he knew Mason hadn't left the room.

"... how can I help?"

"... uh, clean the kitchen sink and put a few inches of lukewarm water in it."

"Right."

"Then go in Wyatt's room and—" Never mind. Trying to describe the right kind of infant clothing to Connor Mason was asking for trouble. Garcia got fresh clothes for Grace himself.

She hated being bathed. But being clean seemed to calm her, and— crucially— her fever dropped. A bit.

"Anything else you need?" Mason finally asked.

Garcia shook his head, still bouncing her to try to settle her.

"Right, I'm... going back to bed. Wake me if I can help. Or, uh..."

Garcia glared at him for the addition of those two ominous little syllables. Mason flinched, and scurried into the hallway.

He carried her over to the window and stared out at the dark prairie as she fussed halfheartedly, like she didn't even have the energy to complain any more. Oh, God. No, _no_ — that wasn't it. He was too damn old to let his imagination run away with him like that. She was just tired and settling down to sleep.

Slowly, she settled into a fitful sleep. He doubted she'd sleep through being placed in her bassinet. He didn't try. He just cradled her against his shoulder and... waited.

He didn't dare pray. After all the things Garcia had done, if God were really listening, attracting his attention couldn't be good for anyone in Garcia's vicinity. And Garcia already knew—

He couldn't count on God to save a little girl.

Instead, he stared at the stars, and tried to get reassurance from her slow breath against his neck.

She didn't sleep long, and she wouldn't take a bottle when she woke. Damn it. If he could just make it down to 20, surely he could find a ride to the hospital. But the road out of here was ten, fifteen miles of gravel and hard-baked mud. He honestly didn't know if that old truck could take it, and if they broke down out there ten miles from civilization...

He tried everything he could think of to keep her calm when gently rocking her no longer soothed her. He paced the living room, the ache in his leg turning deep and bitter, crooning English lullabies, and then the half-remembered Croatian ones his grandmother had sang to him. Those he had to fill in with humming because he'd forgotten so many words. His throat tried to close on him, from pain and—

Emotional detachment be damned. She just had to get _through_ this.

"Come on, little one," he muttered. "Be an annoying stubborn shit like your father. Come on." He pressed his nose against the top of her hair.

Was he imagining it, or was she a little cooler?

When he stopped to think about it, she started crying again. "Clearly I should've specified," he sighed. "Be an annoying stubborn shit like your father and _get better_ , but also _go to sleep_." He swayed with her, then started to limp back and forth across the floor again.

She definitely wasn't getting warmer. The thermometer confirmed that. Should he give her another bath? No, she was in that spot between waking and sleeping, which was better than full-blown awake. He just needed to— keep going.

He grew tired enough that he could no longer push back the memories he'd been avoiding, of walking the floor with Iris when she was about this age. Exhausted and pained as he was, his defenses were down, and _that_ pain came back in force. His girl, his little girl...

The overwhelming ache was almost physical. He had to sink down on the couch and wait for the immediacy to pass. Iris was dead. The tiny child he'd carried around their own living room had grown up to be murdered by Rittenhouse for something _he'd_ done. He couldn't help her right now— maybe not, maybe not...

Ever.

But Grace Logan, he could keep from meeting a similar fate.

She felt warmer than she should, but cooler than she had. He settled her against him again, propped his aching leg up on the couch, and leaned against the arm, just for a moment...

His phone jolted him awake and into a state of utter confusion. Grace started wailing. What— when—

It was Denise. "I just got Connor's message. How is she?"

Garcia fumbled for his wits. He felt Grace's skin. "She's, uh..." He tried to clear the sleep out of his voice, and disguise the utter relief, at the same time. "I think the fever's broken. One minute."

He tried to get up for the thermometer. His leg had completely seized up on him. He swore softly and forced himself to standing, nearly toppling over and dropping Grace in the process. His healing wound screamed at him as he limped across the room.

But the thermometer confirmed what he'd thought. "Yes—" His voice nearly broke. He tried again. "Her temperature's normal."

"Are you sure? I can have a car there in two hours."

"Send it anyway. Wyatt should take her to the doctor when he's back, and we need a road-worthy vehicle here when you're not." Garcia swayed again, but this time from pain and fatigue instead of trying to calm Grace.

He had no idea what he said after that. It could've been gibberish. They hung up. He collapsed on the couch again.

Grace did not quiet. Well, after not eating all night she was probably starving now. He tried to stand and discovered that his leg simply would not cooperate. Not this time.

He growled softly, then called, "Mason!"

Mason appeared at the end of the hallway, wide-eyed, in less time than Garcia expected. "What?"

Garcia closed his eyes. "Make her up a bottle, will you?"

Mason thankfully did not question why Garcia didn't do it himself. "You'll have to tell me how."

Reluctantly, Garcia opened his eyes and _looked_ at the other man.

"I am an _engineer_ ," Mason bit out, "and she is not a circuit board."

Garcia recited the instructions—

"English, man!"

Oh hell, he _was_ tired. He hadn't done that in years.

Somehow they got Grace a bottle before she grew hungry enough to start gnawing on Garcia's flesh. "Is she better?" Mason asked, hovering awkwardly as Garcia fed her.

"Yeah." Garcia paused, trying to collect additional words in a sensible order. "Car's coming," he added. "Anyway."

Mason brought the bassinet and diaper bag out to the living room. The food had calmed Grace enough that Garcia thought she might finally be able to sleep without him serving as a heated mattress. He tried again to get up, just to move her those few feet, but he couldn't.

"Here, I can do that part at least."

Reluctantly, Garcia handed the sleepy baby to Mason and watched as he—

"On her _back_ ," he snapped.

Mason jumped and rolled Grace over. She promptly woke up and started howling. "Oh God," Mason said. "Where's the reset button?"

Garcia thought an alphabet of obscenities. "Give her to me and just... go. Away."

So much for that.

At least he could sleep sitting up on the couch. Unlike the bed. He bounced her and bounced her as time did that funny thing it did when you were exhausted...

He woke to broad daylight and the sound of the Lifeboat returning. And Grace crying, the sound of a resentfully hungry baby. But a very active baby with a normal temperature. He thought of how sluggish and hot she'd been, in the early hours of the morning, and he had to press his head against hers for a minute.

A quick footstep jerked him awake again. What? He'd slept for—

Just seconds. But it was Wyatt's footstep, and of all the people Garcia wanted to find him like that with Grace, he was surely the very last.

"Here, take her," he said roughly, to shove through the moment.

Wyatt gave him a strange look. Garcia honestly would've preferred either anger or scorn. "How was she?" he asked, crossing the room.

"And do you know who Cesar Chavez was?" Lucy added, appearing in the doorway behind him.

"She was _very_ sick last night," Connor Blabbermouth Mason materialized to say.

Garcia seriously considered getting up just to intimidate him into never doing anything that stupid again.

"Flynn was up with her for hours— I heard you walking," he added, apparently mistaking Garcia's glare for an expression of _how did you know?_

"What was wrong with her?" Wyatt demanded, checking Grace's temperature and staring at her as if he could figure it out that way.

"She had a fever," Garcia managed tiredly. "It's gone now. You should... take her to the doctor." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the garage.

"What kind of a fever?"

There was only one _kind_ of—

Garcia closed his eyes and sank down against the couch.

"Garcia?" Lucy's voice, close. "Are _you_ okay?"

"Fine."

Pause. "You sure?"

If he didn't convince her, she was going to... _Lucy_ at him. Would that thought have made _more_ or _less_ sense if he weren't so tired? "Help me up?" he admitted.

But it was definitely not Lucy who grabbed his shoulder and started heaving him out of the couch. "Up on three," Wyatt told him.

Too tired to tell Wyatt where he could put his counting, Garcia complied. His leg throbbed fiercely and nearly buckled. He wasn't at all surprised to almost topple the smaller man to the ground, but Wyatt managed to recover and steer him towards the hallway. He was using both hands— ah. Lucy was holding Grace. Like a sack of explosive potatoes, but that was a mystery for another time.

"Why are all of you so short," Garcia managed, as he and Wyatt nearly collided with the wall.

"To get on your nerves."

"It's working."

They reached his bedroom. Garcia let go of Wyatt, nearly collapsed, grabbed the bed frame on his way down, and hauled himself haphazardly onto the mattress. Wyatt said something, but Garcia was already asleep.

#

Lucy woke up when Garcia got up. He wasn't up in the middle of the night to do more PT, was he? He was pushing himself to the point of tears trying to rehabilitate his leg, but this would be extreme, even for him.

No, he was... getting his shoes and a blanket. "What's wrong?" she muttered.

"Nothing. Sorry to wake you."

"What are you doing?"

He hesitated. "Getting some air. Wanna come?"

She pulled on her robe and stuffed her feet into her sneakers, then followed him through the dark house and out the back door. He headed across the prairie, walking carefully and leaning on his cane.

After about five minutes he stopped and started to shake out the blanket. Lucy grabbed two corners, and together they spread it out on the grass. He looked at her, looked at the ground, and hesitated.

She dropped to her knees on his good side and put his hand on her shoulder. Leaning heavily on her, and on his cane, he lowered himself, then fell awkwardly the last six inches or so. Lucy grabbed him and kept him from pitching forward. Well, considering their respective masses, she really slowed his descent long enough that he could recover and keep _himself_ from pitching forward.

"Thanks," he muttered.

He stretched out on his back, looking up, and Lucy followed suit. "Oh— _oh_." The sky took her breath away. The air here was dry, they were miles from any town, and all the lights in the house were off.

It was stunning.

"I've never," she managed. "Lived anywhere where you could see it so clear."

"Spending twenty years as a peripatetic soldier did have its advantages. The views were one of them."

Something streaked across her vision. She thought it was a firefly until her brain caught up with her. "Can you retroactively wish upon a shooting star?"

"What did you wish for?" he asked after a minute.

She hesitated. "Peace," she admitted. "But, you know, a _good_ peace. Not the kind where a terrible tyrant takes over and stifles all dissent. That doesn't count."

"That's... specific."

"When I first... you know, as a kid, when I first learned to make up my own prayers, I always... had all these conditions intended to prevent God from finding loopholes. I guess I thought... I don't know. Guess I was thinking of him as kind of a vindictive genie."

"Religion was a complicated subject in our house," he said after a minute. "My father was Catholic, like just about everyone else we knew. My mother was Baptist. Not many Baptists in Dubrovnik in the 1970s. It was one of the things they fought about."

She turned her head to look at him. "And you?"

Another pause. "She died when I was young, I went to live with my father's mother, who was... _very_ Catholic. Then I went off to war, and... didn't believe much of anything for a while." Pause. "Lorena... Lorena believed."

"We were Episcopalian, growing up," she said after a minute. "... Oh, God. Do you think Episcopalians are Rittenhouse?"

"Why?"

"Well... they're called the 'Frozen Chosen.' Historically they've been considered kind of elitist, and... I know my mother's family is Episcopalian way back." She paused. "They were also one of the first mainline denominations to ordain women, though. So probably not."

Another shooting star briefly trailed across the sky. "There's a lot of them tonight," she said.

"Perseids. 's why I wanted to come out."

The locusts— crickets— whatever— were singing steadily all around them. The breeze ruffling the grass made a beautiful whispering sound, and the prairie flowers smelled sweet. Lucy tried to let the peace of the night wash over her. She saw another meteor, and then another.

"Still wishing for peace?"

"You got any better ideas?"

He didn't reply.

She watched the sky, but her eyelids were heavy. Being out here was silencing all the parts of her brain that usually kept her awake worrying— or remembering.

"This is nice," she whispered drowsily.

"Mmm."

She saw something that looked a little like a shooting star, but was too slow and steady. She pointed. "Is that a satellite?"

"Yeah." He was quiet a minute. "My mother loved to look up," he said. "She was the one who taught me everything..."

"I'm sorry Wyatt was the only one who got to meet her in 1968."

"You would have liked her. Then." Pause. "I always knew she must have been indomitable... once."

She looked at him again.

"She would always say that her two heroes were Eleanor Roosevelt and Hedy Lamarr." He sounded amused, and bemused, and wistful. "She had— I don't know how the hell she got it— she had a photo of Hedy Lamarr and Grace Hopper, signed by both of them."

"She— wait. What? Hedy Lamarr? But—"

Garcia looked at her. "Yeah, she was a tech genius in an era where the field was basically dominated by men."

"Time travel makes my head hurt," Lucy muttered.

"I heard you and Rufus talking about her the day I came to the bunker. What was she like in your old timeline?"

"She— she was most famous for being an actress. Not many people knew about her inventions. She never got credit until late in her lifetime, and she died... unhappy."

" _Huh_ ," Garcia said after a minute.

Another comfortable silence.

"I have— I had that photo," he said. "I meant to give it to Iris when she was older."

Lucy didn't say anything, because there was nothing she _could_ say. But she let her heart ache, for the murdered Flynns, and for Garcia. She didn't believe him that the Garcia who cared about helping others had died alongside his family. But the more she got to know him, the more she got glimpses of who he must have been, before that night. The more she got to know him, the more she saw how much he'd lost.

More shooting stars. She stopped counting after twenty. "At least this is one thing Rittenhouse can never change," she whispered, staring up at the cosmos.

She wriggled on the blanket to get a rock out of the small of her back. She glanced at him, lying quiet and still beside her. He turned his head when he saw her looking, then looked back at the sky.

She slid her hand across the blanket and hesitated. She stopped, then pulled back. She slid her hand towards him again. Her arm bumped his. Her fingers hovered awkwardly over his hand for a moment. Then she gently, hesitantly, tucked her fingers against his palm.

He slid his fingers around hers, his grasp warm and firm, and turned their hands to lie flat, his against the blanket, hers on top.

Lucy relaxed, tension she hadn't noticed draining away. Her eyelids drooped. The locusts lulled her...

She fell asleep like that.

#

Three days after they helped Jessie Lopez de la Cruz save Cesar Chavez from Rittenhouse, Denise returned to take Garcia to his next appointment. But she looked _haggard_.

"Any news about Rittenhouse?" Denise asked. Her question startled Lucy— it was so clear Denise had news of her own.

"We kept them from destroying one of the most important labor movements of the 20 th  century," Lucy said. "They haven't jumped since then."

"I don't think they will," Wyatt said. "I saw Emma."

Denise's eyebrows went up. He'd already shared this with the rest of them.

"I didn't get a clean shot at her, but she looked awful," Wyatt continued. "I think their new pilot is grounded after I shot him in Memphis, and Emma had to take over."

"So... they might not jump for a while?" Jiya asked.

Wyatt shrugged, unwilling to venture an opinion on Emma's determination or desperation. "Any new leads on where they are in the present? If we can—"

"Not since the last time you asked, no."

Lucy frowned. It wasn't unusual for Denise to sound frustrated. But— "Denise, what is it?"

Denise gave her a tired look. "Rittenhouse raided our house."

"Oh my God, are—" Lucy began, as the others also started talking.

"Michelle and the kids moved out shortly after you got back from Chinatown." Denise didn't raise her voice, but everyone fell silent. "They're safe, thank God."

Lucy felt a rush of relief. But still, for Rittenhouse to invade their _home_ like that—

She knew something about how that felt.

"We gotta assume they'll try something like that again," Wyatt said. Lucy frowned a little, because of course Denise would have thought of that—

But he was looking at Jiya. The only one of them with surviving immediate family that wasn't dead, here, or Rittenhouse.

"My mom's in _Beirut_ ," Jiya said, as if they were crazy. "They've always stayed in the United States. You really think Rittenhouse would—"

"We were in Zagreb."

Everyone was silent after Garcia bit out those words. Finally Denise said, gently, "I want to ask the embassy in Beirut to keep an eye out on your mother. But I need you to talk to her first so she's not alarmed."

"Talk to her and tell her killers might be coming after her because of my job? Yeah, what could possibly alarm her about that?"

"I have a, ah... contact in Beirut," Garcia said, after Jiya's sarcasm left a hole in the conversation. "I can talk to her and ask her to help. If that's... okay with you," he added awkwardly to Jiya.

"What could your contact do?" Jiya looked dubious, or maybe just worried.

"If I ask her to? Make sure your mom's under twenty four hour surveillance until we take down Rittenhouse."

"Ah," Wyatt said knowingly. "One of _those_ kinds of contacts."

Garcia looked at him. "Let he who's never spent the night with a visiting foreign intelligence agent cast the first stone."

Wyatt's eyes nearly crossed. "How could you know— no, _don't_ answer that."

Garcia smirked.

"That was— _one night_ , for the record," Wyatt said to the air. Maybe in her direction. She didn't know and she didn't want to.

Except— "Wait," she said. In Garcia's timeline, Wyatt had always been married to Jessica. So how _had_ he known? Unless... "Don't tell me _that_ was in the journal."

Now everyone looked confused.

"No," Wyatt protested after a moment. "No way. Are you saying that even when Jess was alive, I still...?"

Garcia said nothing. Very loudly.

"I don't believe you." Wyatt tried to smirk, but his voice lacked conviction.

"Now that we've got those _critical_ details sorted out..." Jiya said. Both men looked abashed. "... Flynn, how, uh, trustworthy is this contact of yours?"

"Trustworthy enough."

Jiya made an impatient gesture. "That's not good enough. Can I trust her with my mother's life?"

Garcia was quiet for a long moment. "I would've trusted her with my family."

Lucy winced, inwardly. She remembered what he'd yelled as the SWAT team dragged him away. She hoped he wasn't remembering it, too.

Jiya eyed him. "Fine," she said. "Get her involved. Please."

Garcia nodded once.

"And I'll... Skype with my mom today or tomorrow, whenever I can reach her."

"The sooner, the better," Denise advised, and moved towards the door.

"What about Rufus?" Wyatt asked.

They all looked back at him.

"I mean, I know they think he was dead after the explosion, but..."

Jiya shook her head. "He got in touch with them after 1918. Once Rittenhouse knew he was alive, there was no point in hiding it from _them_. He didn't get to— see them, but he, um, Skyped with them."

Wyatt frowned. "Oh."

"You were... busy," Jiya offered.

Another loud silence.

"So when we get him back," Wyatt said after a minute. "If Emma finds out, now that she's calling the shots, she wouldn't hesitate to go after them. Maybe..." He glanced at Denise. "You evacuated your family. Maybe we need to evacuate his."

"What, just... tear them away from their lives?" Lucy asked. "Their jobs? School?" She didn't know much about Rufus's family, but she knew his little brother was still in college.

"Rufus was the breadwinner," Denise said. "And Kevin is on summer break right now." She sounded as if she were genuinely considering it. She looked at Jiya. "How close are we to being able to go back for him?"

Jiya hesitated. "Close," she admitted, guardedly, as if she wasn't quite willing to believe it.

Denise nodded, looking satisfied. "I'll reach out to them. See what we can do."

After another minute or two they dispersed, Jiya to where Connor was working on the Lifeboat, Wyatt to Grace, Lucy to her books. Garcia started to follow her, stopped, then turned back to Denise. Denise looked a little surprised, and from the hesitation on Garcia's face, this wasn't about tactics. Lucy let them have their privacy.

#

"Who's that with Wyatt?"

Lucy looked up quickly at Garcia's words, but he sounded confused, not alarmed.

They'd temporarily relocated to a base in the foothills of the Absarokas. They weren't staying there, but the Carlins would be, assuming Wyatt succeeding in bringing them. Jiya had met them a few times before the explosion at Mason Industries, so Denise wanted her there when they arrived. And where Jiya went, the Lifeboat and the rest of them had to go, in case Rittenhouse jumped. So... here they were, in western Wyoming.

Lucy didn't mind. Her spare time was split between searching history, and the simulator, and here, she could still do the one of those that she actually enjoyed.

And now, apparently, Wyatt was back.

"Uh, Rufus's family?" Why did Garcia sound so—

"That is _not_ Rufus's family."

Lucy got up quickly and joined him at the window. He... was right. The older white couple and young white man climbing out of the van was definitely not the Carlins. The Carlins did emerge from the other side of the van and circled around to join the others, who were staring at everything around them. They all looked about as confused as Lucy felt.

Wyatt didn't look at all alarmed, but that didn't completely reassure her. Beside her, Garcia frowned and glanced back toward the bedrooms, where Grace was napping.

There was something familiar about that woman's eyes, maybe, the set of her mouth—

"Oh no," Lucy breathed, and ran outside.

She slowed to a stop as Wyatt threw open the back doors of the van. "You _kidnapped_ your _inlaws_?" she said in a fierce whisper.

"I didn't _kidnap_ them." He sounded aggrieved.

"But they are—"

"— Jessica's parents and brother. Yeah."

Lucy fumbled for words, and finally settled on, " _Why_? Jessica's— Rittenhouse!"

"Yeah, and if she ever wants to leave, the first thing they're gonna do is come after her family."

Lucy thought about that, and closed her mouth.

"Besides." He glanced up at Garcia, who'd followed Lucy more slowly. "Eventually Flynn's gonna be coming on missions again with us, and I'll need someone to look after Grace. Who better than her grandparents?"

"Wyatt, _they_ could be Rittenhouse!"

"They're definitely not Rittenhouse. If they'd been Rittenhouse they wouldn't have needed to trade Kevin's life for Jessica. Rittenhouse would've had her already." Wyatt heaved some bags out of the back.

Okay, that made sense. But still— "What are you going to tell Denise? Last time you brought someone—"

"She was the one to make the arrangements."

"... oh." Lucy hesitated. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't've assumed—"

"What, that I was being reckless and hotheaded again?" Wyatt gave her a wry smile that she couldn't help mirroring.

Lucy stepped out from behind the van in time to see Jiya give Angela Carlin a fierce hug, squeezing her eyes shut as she held on. Lucy smiled, grabbed two bags and headed for the cabin.

She _also_ saw the moment when Connor came out of the cabin and flinched. Lucy glanced over her shoulder: Angela was regarding him as if he were a venomous snake.

"I should've known you were involved," she said. "I should've known that even after you got Rufus mixed up with, with spies and explosions and criminals, even after you got him _killed_ , you'd find a way to make trouble."

"Connor didn't get Rufus killed, ma'am," Wyatt said. "That was my fault."

Angela looked at him dubiously. "I don't know you, but I do know _him_."

They'd been close, hadn't they? Connor and Rufus's whole family?

"Connor made some mistakes." Denise followed Connor out of the cabin. "We all did. But he didn't get him killed. That blame lies squarely with a woman who's still out there, somewhere, and we brought you here to protect you from her." She offered her hand. "Denise Christopher, Homeland Security. We spoke on the phone." She looked around. "Why don't we all go inside and do explanations and introductions there?"

Garcia handed Grace to Wyatt and went to grab the rest of the bags, so she followed him to help. Not an ideal task for a man who'd just started walking without a cane, but... he'd either shot or had shot both of the people whose families were in there right now. Even if he hadn't been on multiple wanted lists, avoiding them made sense.

"My son is not a soldier," Angela was saying when they got inside with the last bags. Garcia disappeared towards the bedrooms. Lucy stayed.

"No," Wyatt agreed, holding Grace close. "But he's— he was a good man and a brave one, and he was serving his country in a way literally no one else could."

"He died coming after me," Jiya said quietly.

Angela looked at her.

"I was stuck in a dangerous place far away. Rufus saved me." Her eyes shone, but she didn't blink; her voice didn't falter. "That's what he was doing there when he... when they found him."

"But _how_ are we in danger _now?_ " Angela asked. "Are these people he was fighting really so vindictive they'd come after us even though he's _dead?_ "

"He's dead now," Jiya told her. "But we think he doesn't have to stay that way."

Connor looked towards the heavens; Denise's lips compressed a little.

That did not appear to reassure Angela. Connor, Denise, and Jiya between them spent about ten minutes swearing to her that, no, this wasn't a reenactment of _Frankenstein_ , no, they weren't doing anything awful. Lucy wandered over to where Kevin Carlin was sitting alone on one of the sofas.

"Hey," she said quietly. "Pretty crazy day, huh?"

He snorted. "Yeah, you could say that."

"I'm sorry about Rufus," she said after a minute.

He swallowed. "Thanks." He looked down at his sneakers, then gave her a quick, shy— evaluative?— sideways look. "Did you... know him much?"

She nodded. "We, um... worked together. Traveled together. I lost track of how often he saved my life. He was an amazing man, Kevin."

Kevin gave her a shy smile. "That's what he does," he said. "Or— did, I guess. He saved us, too."

Lucy smiled back, and tried to blink back tears.

"Can I put my stuff someplace?" he added.

She showed him the bedrooms— she had no idea where Wyatt and Denise intended to put Jessica's family, but first come first serve— and left him alone, because he seemed to want space. Then she went to get the rest of their stuff out of the other bedrooms, but Garcia had already done that, before disappearing.

Denise, Connor, Jiya, and Angela were in the kitchen, talking quietly. Jessica's brother was sprawled in a chair off to the side, looking bored, staring at his phone. Lucy knew there was no signal here, so he'd be waiting a while.

The remaining three were talking... less quietly.

"We didn't _know_ ," Jessica's mom was protesting. "We had no idea!"

"Really," Wyatt said. "You didn't think there was anything suspicious about someone showing up out of the blue and offering to cure your son in return for your daughter?"

Lucy was steering _far_ clear of this one. She made up a bottle for Grace, brought it to Wyatt, and then slipped out to look for Garcia and wait.

That night, they went back to the Nebraska base— without Grace, for the first time since they'd arrived. Wyatt was sullen and snappish. When she tried to talk to him, he said he just needed to be alone. So they all gave him some space.

He did join them, leaning against the doorway, when Denise updated them all on the effort to lure Emma and her agents to the fake safe house outside of Reno. "We've started to notice some people in town who might be doing surveillance for them," Denise finished. "So it's working. We've faked up records for someone matching Flynn's description at a doctor in the city. What we need next, to keep them interested, is—"

"Bait," Wyatt said.

Denise nodded.

"I'll go," Lucy said. "We know Emma wants me."

"She wants you _dead_ ," Wyatt said. "It's too dangerous. _I'll_ go."

"When is it not dangerous?" Lucy asked wearily. Emma wanted them all dead... and now Wyatt had a kid who needed him to come home after this war was over.

"You'll have agents with you the whole time," Denise promised. "We just need you to be visible. We don't think they'll try to kill you. Not until they can follow you to find the rest of us."

" _That's_ a cheerful thought," Wyatt muttered.

Denise looked at Lucy. "Can you be ready to go in the morning?"

Lucy nodded.

Garcia hadn't said a word, but as they got ready for bed that night, she felt him watching her. "I'll be careful," she promised him.

"Good."

But there was clearly something else there; he was distracted as he ran through yet another round of PT. When he finished, grimacing, she sat beside him on the edge of his bed. She gently put her arm around him. The feel of his solid back under her hand prompted that now-familiar pull of attraction, but she told herself, as she always did, that this wasn't the time.

When _would_ be the—

 _Nope_.

He looked at her, curious.

"You miss her," Lucy guessed.

He inhaled sharply, and looked away. "She's not my child."

No. But that wasn't what Lucy had asked.

"I was..." He sighed. "Clearly I'm out of practice at being a heartless bastard. I was trying not to get attached."

She rubbed her hand up and down his back a moment, then straightened up.

"... don't you dare tell Wyatt," he added.

She snorted. "I wasn't going to, Garcia."

But one day, these two battered soldiers _were_ going to figure out just how much they had in common, and she hoped she was there to see it.

#

Three days later, he was compiling a list of his findings on Lucy's soldier when the door opened and she strode in. He hadn't heard her come back— he looked up and smiled at her—

"Are we a couple in the future?"

He narrowly avoided swallowing his own tongue. "What?" he managed.

She crossed her arms over her chest. "Are we. A couple. In the future."

Ah. Yes. That was what he had thought she said.

His heart attack could proceed on schedule.

"It's a simple, yes-or-no question," she added.

This was probably an inopportune time to reflect that this was one of the things for which he, God help him, loved her most dearly: this steely backbone, this fire that burst out of her in fits of take-no-prisoners.

He hadn't seen it in her at first— São Paulo Lucy in this Lucy. But it had been there all along.

"Since when is anything with time travel ever simple?" he managed.

She didn't argue with that, just stood there and let her presence demand an explanation.

"There's things I don't think I can tell you—"

"Says _who_?"

"You. Other you."

"You can't hold my future hostage, Garcia."

"I'm trying to keep it from holding _you_ hostage!" She, with her habit of thinking of the future as fate and fated— "Besides, it's _not_ your future. I know that now. It was her past, but when she went back to give me the journal, she changed it. She set herself— set _you—_ on a new timeline."

And what, exactly, had São Paulo Lucy returned to her own future to find? Would this Lucy someday be suddenly replaced by her, in the same manner that this Lucy had replaced the one who'd grown up never knowing Henry Wallace as her father?

She stared at him. "You know something. And I want to know what it is."

 _What I know is the thought of being anything to you because you think the journal says it_ has _to be so, revolts me_. "Fine," he said evenly. "You tell me why it matters to you. And I'll tell you what I know."

Would she call his bluff? If she did—

He held her gaze.

Her cheeks flushed faintly pink, but she didn't look away. "I want to know because it concerns me. It's my life."

"It's not your life. It _was_ your life in some other timeline."

"A timeline very similar to this one."

It was a good thing they both knew he was a bastard, or what he had to say now would have confirmed it. "If that's really your reason, then why is _that_ , of all things, what you want to know?"

She stared at him.

He stared back.

"Fine," she said finally, prompting twin surges of relief and disappointment in him. "The me who stepped out of the Lifeboat, was that the me you met in São Paulo?"

"I don't... think so. In São Paulo you wore your hair about the length it is now."

"So Lifeboat Lucy could be a slightly older version of São Paulo Lucy?"

"Could be."

She stepped forward. "You have no right to keep things from me—"

He raised his hands. "I'm as in the dark as you. Maybe Lifeboat Lucy was the third version of you I've met. I don't know."

She studied him carefully. "But you have an opinion."

He made a wry face. "Lucy, I _always_ have an _opinion_."

"Then let's hear this one."

He touched his tongue to his upper lip. "São Paulo Lucy and... Lifeboat Lucy both had a certain edge," he said carefully, trying to recollect his impressions and also watch his words. "But not the _same_ one. Lifeboat Lucy was— battle-tested. But she still had a certain— optimism about her. São Paulo Lucy, I'd say, was sharpened by isolation." He shook his head slowly. "No. I don't think the Lucy who stepped out of the Lifeboat was the older version of São Paulo Lucy."

Lucy looked like she was beginning to have a headache, a sentiment with which he agreed. "Maybe it's the other way around, then. São Paulo Lucy had had time to grow her hair out, and..." She looked away, clearly uncomfortable. "Be on her own."

Garcia studied her. "Lucy, when we first met, I was wrong."

"About a lot of things," she agreed.

He swallowed a smile. "I kept telling you the journal was your future. I thought that if I just waited long enough, talked you into it, it would be. But it's not. It doesn't have to be. I'm not sure it _can_ be. You know that, right?"

And if she didn't, that was squarely on him.

"Yeah," she said quietly. "I know." She looked away, then sat down on the edge of her bed. "I've been keeping notes," she admitted. "Everything we come back to find changed, I... I write down how it was in the old timeline. As much as I can remember."

"That's that sheaf you keep in the Lifeboat?"

She looked surprised, but nodded. "I guess that's my version of the journal." She smiled bleakly.

"How was Reno?" he asked abruptly, after casting about in his mind for anything else to say.

She shrugged. "No one tried to kill us, so I guess it was fine."

He'd been impatient with the Lucy he'd met outside the Hindenburg, but now his heart ached for the loss of that innocent woman who never would've said what Lucy had just said.

"Did you shoot a man just to watch him die?"

She looked at him blankly.

"It's, uh, a song... never mind." He cleared his throat. "I think I found something. Here."

She sat on the end of her bed and leaned forward. He showed her what he'd done.

#

He woke. Like always, he took a second, still and silent, to collect himself. That pause revealed no threat, and he opened his eyes to the slats of the bunkbed above.

He hesitated another moment, then slid quietly out from under the covers. Lucy was sleeping peacefully, her breathing slow and even, her hair spread all over her pillow. Good. She needed more sleep like that.

It was 3:54. He wouldn't sleep again. He silently collected his clothes and dressed in the bathroom.

Halfway to the dark kitchen, the smell of coffee alerted him he wouldn't be alone. He paused at the threshold; Jiya was sitting at the table in her pajamas, slumped over a mug.

"Help yourself," she muttered, not looking up.

The pot was lighter than he expected. She'd been up for a while. He hesitated, then sat down at the table with her. She had deep bags under her eyes; had she slept at all?

"Does it matter if we get Rufus back?" she muttered after a few silent minutes.

Startled, he looked at her.

"I saw Rufus shoot Sewell, and when Rufus refused to shoot him, Sewell got trampled," she said slowly. "I saw someone shoot Rufus, and when I saved him, Emma killed him." She paused. "Rufus said— in the old timeline, he and Wyatt went back and prevented the man you said killed Jessica from ever being born, but she was still dead." She slumped even lower. "If we save him in Chinatown... does he fall out of the Lifeboat and snap his neck? Does he, I don't know, horribly disintegrate on the trip back to the present because we've broken some law of time travel?"

He took a slow drink of coffee, not sure how much these questions were rhetorical, or whether his reflections would be welcome. The silence stretched out. Finally he said, "It's strange that... Lucy used to worry about preserving history, but... your visions don't seem to."

"What do you mean, Flynn?" she asked tiredly.

"I mean... there's no _possible_ way to interpret _meant to be_ that includes Rufus being in 1692, or Emma being in 1888. None of that was ever supposed to happen."

"It's the future," she said, still weary. "And now, all of our possible futures are from a present where Connor opened Pandora's Box."

They sat quietly for a while, until he said, "You know, the Lucy who wrote the journal believed in choke points. Things that _had_ to happen for a whole set of possible futures to take place."

"So maybe Rufus was always meant to die." Her tone was bleak, but she didn't sound at all surprised.

"Maybe, but... that doesn't mean he was meant to stay dead, does it?"

She looked up.

"Maybe whatever had to happen to get through the choke point has already happened. I mean... we go back and save him from Chinatown, it's not like it never happened. Whoever goes on that trip will remember, and the Lifeboat will come back to the present with the ability to travel back in your own timeline. Maybe that technology is what has to happen. Maybe, ever since a Lucy came back in time to give me the journal, we always had to reach a point where that was invented. Or maybe there's some other reason for that to be the choke point."

She looked extremely thoughtful, and considered for a minute or two. "You're not just saying this to make me feel better, are you?"

"Come on, you know me better than that."

She snorted. "And so what does that mean for... all the future Lucys? And future Wyatt?"

He looked at his half-empty mug. "I don't think there's enough coffee left in the _house_ for me to think about that one."

She smirked. They continued in silence a bit longer.

"I'm still so angry with him," she muttered. "Why couldn't he have _listened?_ "

"He did listen," Garcia pointed out. "But you both were determined to be the one to sacrifice for the other. There are, ah..." He hesitated. "Worse problems."

She looked down. "And then sometimes I think I'm that angry because I feel guilty I gave in and came with you."

Garcia wasn't interested in playing therapist, let alone qualified. But he knew, oh, he knew what she was going through. "He never would've left you there," he said. "If you'd refused to come then he would've jumped us back three years earlier and tried before you became convinced he was going to die."

Her look was unreadable. After a minute, she took a deep breath and straightened up. "So," she said, in a determinedly cheerful— well, cheerful-er— tone. "What brings _you_ to Insomnia Kitchen?"

He stared down at his cup again. No reason to answer that, except—

He touched his tongue to his top lip. "I dreamed about my girls."

Her mouth made a silent 'oh.'

"It's the only way I see them, now," he added. If he tried, he could still feel the phantom weight of Lorena's head against his shoulder, and hear the way Iris's laughter bubbled out of her almost in hiccups. But it was like trying to hold onto a fistful of water. "They're less... vivid than they used to be," he said softly. "One day, unless I die first, either... I get them back, or the dreams stop."

She gave him a soft, sad look. But then she followed it up with, "Are you still trying to get them back?"

He glared. But at some unfortunate point she'd become immune.

"I have eyes," she said. "And I like Lucy. I don't want to see her hurt again."

The last time this subject had come up, he'd gotten shot. That might actually be preferable. He had no reason to answer, and he wasn't going to.

Except—

"I think," he said quietly, "their death is another choke point."

It was the first time he'd said those words out loud. He prodded at them as if at a wound. Predictably, they hurt like hell.

The look she gave him was startled, but suggested she understood far better than he'd... expected.

"Maybe what you told me is true about them, too. Maybe... what needed to happen has already happened, and you can go back and save them."

Maybe. He'd thought through it many times, and he didn't see how that was possible. But... maybe.

"I used to think that, if... I ever managed to save them, I would say goodbye and then leave," he said.

Jiya's eyes widened. "Wait, _wh_ —"

"But now I think... it's better for them if they think I'm dead. If they know I'm alive out there, _somewhere_ , and I've walked out on them? That would hurt them."

He'd toyed with the idea of saying goodbye and then faking his death. He desperately wanted to see them again, hold them again. But now, so much time had passed... if he came back to the present to find they were alive again, would he have been gone this whole time? Would they already have been dealing with the pain of that? His "death" hard on the heels of a reunion would just be cruel.

It would be enough for him, to know they were alive and safe. To watch from a distance.

"Sorry, _what?_ " Jiya said. "Your family? That you've been murdering people for this whole time? You don't want them back?"

Garcia nearly laughed. _Want_ was a wholly insufficient word. He longed for them. But he also longed to be the man who could be with them. And that was out of his reach forever.

" _Why?_ "

There was a damned _limit_ to the number of invasive questions he was willing to answer, and they were fast approaching it. When had he started to care what Jiya thought of him, anyway?

"I'm not the man they knew," he said finally.

Wyatt... had had to choose between Jessica and Lucy. Garcia was in a different situation. Whatever he and Lucy might become to each other, even if that was nothing, he would still— he would still leave Lorena and Iris. Maybe Lucy had been right, that awful night she'd kept him from killing John Rittenhouse, and he could still be someone's partner after all he'd done. But after all he'd done, he was no longer the husband for Lorena. Certainly not the father for Iris. He was too _different_ from the man they'd known.

They both looked up at the sound of Wyatt's footsteps. He shuffled down the hall, looking haggard, but brightened up when he saw there was coffee. He took a clean mug, hefted the pot, and felt how little was left. "Mind if I...?"

"Go ahead," Jiya said. "You look like you, uh, need it."

"I _thought_ I'd sleep better when I wasn't waking up every two hours with an infant," he said, only half-intelligible with his voice echoing in the mug. Then he put it down on the counter. "Turns out I just trained myself to wake up every two hours."

"Could've been worse," Garcia pointed out.

"Please, Flynn," Wyatt said drily, with mock politeness. "Tell me how it could be worse."

"You could've been breastfeeding, and then you wouldn't have been able to drink coffee at all."

Wyatt considered this. He winced. "Fair point."

"Or you could've been raising a baby with someone who's breastfeeding and be in the same boat."

Wyatt stared at him in disbelief. "Are you saying you gave up _coffee_ out of sympathy for your _wife?_ "

"Not... _sympathy_ , it was more, oh, the homicidal gleam in Lorena's eye every time she saw me with a coffee mug in my hand."

Jiya snorted. "Sorry."

But Garcia didn't mind. He wouldn't have said her name if he'd minded— well, talking about it like this.

The vividness was going from his dreams, but the bitterness was going from his memories. He wasn't sure that was a fair trade.

Wyatt shook his head. "Homicide. Of course. I'm sensing a Flynn family theme here. I do _not_ wanna know what y'all's dates were like."

"There was the time we found a—"

" _I don't want to know_."

Garcia smirked at him.

#

Jiya hadn't known until now that the most beautiful sound in the world was _kachunk, kachunk, kachunk, whiiiirrrrrrrrrrr_... _beep beep beep... kachunk kachunk kachunk kachunk kachunkchunkchunkchunkchunkRAAWWWRRR!_

Her hands shook as Chewbacca's yell, that Rufus had programmed all those months ago as the sound of success, faded away. It took her two tries to turn off the console. She stumbled into the living room.

"All hands on deck!" she called.

Connor appeared almost immediately; he'd been making tea in the kitchen. Wyatt came in in sweatpants, still toweling his hair dry. Jiya waited, then opened the other garage door.

"Hey," she said, as Flynn blocked a half-speed blow from Lucy. "Time out. Um, Avengers assemble."

They lowered their hands. Lucy dropped back to her heels. Flynn mopped his face with his shirt, handed Lucy her water bottle, and gestured for her to go first.

When Flynn and Lucy had stumbled into chairs, still breathing hard, she said, "It works. The Time Warp. Timeline recursion. Um, everything checked out just now. So. I'm going to sleep for twelve hours, and then I'm leaving."

"We," Lucy said firmly. " _We're_ leaving."

"What's the plan?" Wyatt asked.

"We go back, we find Rufus, we drag him bodily to the Lifeboat, and then we get the hell out of there."

And hope he survived the trip.

Wyatt and Flynn looked at each other.

Jiya crossed her arms over her chest. "What?"

"That's a terrible plan," Flynn told her. "It's not even really a plan."

"You've had to do all the work until now to get him back," Wyatt said, before she could retort. "You and Connor, 'cause we didn't know how. But now we can help." He grabbed some scrap paper and a pencil and slid to the floor to squat at the coffee table. "I'm gonna sketch what I remember of how the streets were laid out. You tell me where I'm wrong..."

Ten minutes later, they had a half-decent map and a record of who'd gone where, when. "Okay," Wyatt said. "We don't know where they left the Mothership, but we have to stay out of Rittenhouse's sight, whatever we do. If they see us, they'll know."

"Not if we wear the same clothes," Lucy said.

"We'll do that anyway," Wyatt said. "But Emma _cannot_ find out what Jiya just invented."

No. Jiya didn't want to think about what she'd do with that.

Wyatt looked at her. "Any other ways out of that saloon besides the front and the back doors?"

She shook her head. "Just one window." You could squeeze through in a pinch, as she knew— well, _she_ could. She wasn't sure about Wyatt or Rufus, let alone Flynn.

"Why does it have to be at the saloon?" Lucy asked. "Why can't we grab him earlier?"

"Because—" Jiya hesitated.

The memory of their reunion in the Bison Horn warmed her and stung her all at the same time. She knew it was irrational because she would still remember, but she didn't want to sacrifice it. Rufus, though. Rufus wouldn't.

Did she want to keep things as close as possible, want to have to save his life, so he'd finally believe her about how serious her visions were? Was that where her hesitance came from?

Rufus had convinced her to come back. Well, _Lucy_ had convinced her to come back, and—

"We split up. He went to the saloon alone," Lucy pointed out. "Two of us stop him then and take him back to the Lifeboat. The other two find Jiya at the saloon and take her back to our past selves. If you know Rufus is gone, you'd have to agree to come back, right? Pilot past us home?"

"What happens if Emma catches you there?" Connor asked.

"We'll jump earlier," Wyatt suggested. "Jiya and I will lay low until the right time. Flynn and Lucy go straight to the Bison Horn and collect Jiya while Emma and Rittenhouse are still..."

"At the studio," Lucy finished.

Flynn glanced at her. "What is this gonna change?"

They considered this.

"What does Emma do," he added, "if her ambush fails? If she and Lucy never fight in the alley?"

"Would you just spit it out?" she demanded.

He glanced at her, startled. "I don't know, that's why I'm asking."

"We can't base our plan around what we think Emma will do," Connor said. " _Whatever_ you do will change something. You'll just have to... live with the consequences."

They looked at him.

"I mean, if one of you dies, you'll be coming back anyway. Right? From this other timeline. Our current timeline."

"Thanks for that reassuring spin on things, Connor," Jiya sighed.

Then she looked at Wyatt. His face—

"If Emma doesn't find us in Florida, if Garcia doesn't shoot Jessica," Lucy said quietly, "Grace is born into Rittenhouse custody."

Jiya thought this through. There were any number of ways changing their confrontation with Rittenhouse in 1888 could seriously change the new timeline.

"What if we try to change as little as possible?" Flynn looked like this was a seriously new concept for him. "Go out the front door instead of the back."

"You think Emma won't have thought of that?" Wyatt looked unimpressed. "She'll have someone watching the front door."

"Only person it could be is Jessica. And I shot her hand." Flynn paused. "The Mothership holds six: Emma, Jessica, Nicholas, Carol. The one you shot, and the one Jiya shot. Emma's got no one left."

"Unless she recruited some local talent," Jiya pointed out. "I think we have to take Rufus back with us, not just go back and try to change things then. I've _tried_ changing what I saw. Nothing I did ever _worked_. The only shot we have left is crossing our own timeline."

Wyatt and Flynn started going back and forth about tactics. Jiya listened for a while, then shook her head and wandered towards the back of her house.

She sat down against a chair, closed her eyes, and...

"Jiya?"

She snapped out of it to find Lucy standing over her. She shook her head. "Didn't see anything helpful," she muttered. She already _knew_ what had happened that night. And she couldn't see what might happen if they went back; she didn't have access to that timeline.

She should've been doing this all along. Maybe she could've seen something else. Maybe she would've seen the Florida attack before...

But the Florida attack had saved Grace from Rittenhouse captivity, and had helped her solve timeline recursion.

She accepted Lucy's hand to help her up.

They finally hashed out a plan. Present Jiya and Wyatt would intercept Rufus, because Rufus would never agree to go back without seeing her. Present Lucy and Flynn would find past Wyatt, Lucy and Flynn in the studio, explain the plan, and send them to past Jiya in the Bison Horn. All while trying to stay out of sight of Rittenhouse.

It was not a simple plan.

Lucy rubbed her temples. "Our past selves. Are they going to go back to the bunker, only to be visited a few hours later by yet another future version of ourselves?"

"I don't think so," Connor said. "Future Lucy and Wyatt came back as a last-ditch attempt to get Rufus back. We never lose him, they never need to go back."

"So... when we jump back to the present, is that whole timeline overwritten?" Lucy asked. "They're basically gone?"

Connor shook his head. "I don't know."

Lucy closed her eyes. "This is going to change so much."

"Yeah, that's the point." Not sleeping put a bit of a growl in Jiya's voice. "We _want_ to change things. Like the part where Rufus bleeds out on a filthy porch in 1888 because he's an idiot."

"I meant the rest," Lucy said tiredly.

"Well, whatever it changes, it'll be worth it. Right?"

Lucy looked up at her, and Jiya felt guilty. Lucy had lost Amy to time travel. Lucy glanced at Wyatt, and didn't answer.

Jiya swallowed. She'd thought crossing your own timeline was only complicated in the physics. But it exponentially increased the number of changes they could make. The physics was easy compared to the moral calculations.

"If something happens to her, we'll get her back," she promised Wyatt quietly. "Just like we're getting Rufus back. Now that we know she's, uh, real, we could grab Jessica from the 1930s if we had to. Or— something."

"Something," Wyatt echoed after a minute. "Right." But he met her gaze, and gave her a nod. "One problem at a time."

"Please stop quoting a man who tried to jump out of a plane at twenty thousand feet without a parachute as if that's inspirational," Lucy muttered.

A pause.

"By the way, if we see her?" Lucy added. "Emma's mine."

"No," Wyatt said firmly. "Haven't you been listening? We have to stay out of her—"

"Right, but if we have to shoot her? I'm doing it."

" _No_ ," Wyatt said again. "Whoever has the damn shot _takes_ it. We're not wasting an opportunity to kill her just because you want to do it yourself."

Lucy deflated a little. "I guess you're right," she muttered. "It's just—" She shook her head.

"Just that Emma's taken more from you than from anyone else?" Wyatt asked quietly.

Lucy looked up quickly, her eyes wide and wet. Even Jiya couldn't argue with that one.

Lucy looked away. "Yeah... maybe."

"We know," Wyatt said gently. "But the way to stop her from taking anyone else from you or anyone is for whoever has the chance, to kill her."

Slowly, Lucy nodded. "You're right," she said again.

"Okay," Jiya said after a minute. "Letters to our past selves. Include things no one else would know so we know... they know... they're real. Connor, you'll need one to you and to Rufus, telling him about the fifth Lifeboat, um..." It wasn't a _seat_. "... passenger capacity."

"What about Denise?" Lucy asked.

They got in touch with Denise, and told her the plan. She looked nervous, and Jiya had _never_ seen that before. But she approved the plan, and gave them a message to give to past Lucy to give to her past self. "Good luck," she said softly. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

Everyone settled down to write their messages, and make any last preparations. Jiya knew she needed to sleep, but she wasn't sure she could. She found herself in the kitchen.

And not alone.

"It's usually easier not to... to actually think about getting him back," she told Wyatt. She swallowed. "You'd think it would be motivating, right? But all it reminds me of is when I thought for two minutes that everything was going to be okay. And then he died." She wiped her eyes roughly. "I don't want to let myself believe I might actually see him tomorrow."

Wyatt looked pained. "You don't remember this," he explained, "but in the old timeline I stole the Lifeboat to stop who I _thought_ was Jessica's killer from ever being born."

Jiya nodded. "Rufus told me. It... didn't work."

He shook his head. "I thought I was going to see her, I climbed out of the Lifeboat, and... she was still dead."

Wyatt was really hitting the inspirational speeches on all cylinders today, wasn't he.

"But..." He looked her dead in the eye. "I don't regret it. Not—" He winced. "Not that part of it. Because giving up— that's the worst thing you can do."

Jiya shrugged. "Well," she said. "I guess we'll find out tomorrow."

She made one last stop in the Lifeboat garage, and looked up at the machine she'd retooled to warp the fabric of space-time. You know, more than it already did.

"So," she said, when Connor came up beside her. "How many Lifeboats do you think we're going to come back and find?" When they jumped back to 1888, there'd be two—

_three?_

— Lifeboats there. Past Jiya would take the sat-until-2017 Lifeboat back to May, while she would take the fresh-from-2017 Lifeboat back to now.

"And what are the odds we cause the entire multiverse to implode?" she added.

"We already know it's possible. Future Lucy and Wyatt proved that."

"That's also apparently how Flynn got the journal."

Connor raised his eyebrows.

"Some version of Lucy showed up in 2014 and gave it to him."

Connor frowned. "That does explain a lot."

"About time travel?"

"About Flynn."

Jiya snorted.

Connor turned to her. She was surprised to see his eyes were wet. He hugged her tightly.

"What's this for?" Jiya murmured, returning the hug.

"I'm not going to see you again." His voice was rough. "Not this version of me, anyway. I suppose I'll be... poofed out of existence."

She let go. "Connor—"

He shook his head. "I won't notice, won't remember, right? Technically it happens every time you jump—"

But they weren't usually changing their own history quite so personally.

"Besides, it's worth it to get Rufus back," he added. "Give him my love, all right? I put it in the letter, but... do it for me. For this version of me."

"Of course." Jiya was starting to tear up, herself.

"Don't start that or we'll be here all night. And you need to sleep." He smiled at her. "I'll run the status checks tonight—"

"I want to—"

"— and then set them up again so you can run them in the morning without two hours of prep." He patted her shoulder. "Go on, off to bed with you now."

#

The streets, the sounds, the many, many smells. All viscerally familiar.

"He should be here any minute," Wyatt muttered, checking his watch. They were all wearing them for this trip, synchronized and more or less concealed. Thanks to Flynn's casual disregard for anachronisms, he'd been wearing his watch on their last visit, so he'd had a pretty good idea of what had happened, when. That had let them sketch out a rough timeline. A battle plan.

Jiya's skin felt too tight. She felt a buzzing in her head. Was this a side effect of crossing her own timeline, or was this nerves?

Piloting the Lifeboat was usually like threading a needle. This trip had been like splitting a _hair_ with a needle. It had gone on and on, rougher than usual, and she hadn't had any attention to spare for her passengers, but Wyatt and Flynn had both thrown up upon landing.

But so far there was no sign that they were, like, disintegrating the fabric of space-time. Except for that weird feeling she wasn't sure about.

She also hadn't seen Emma, Jessica, or the two goons. When the team had sat down and mapped out all their own actions, on their last visit to this day, they'd also compiled a pretty good idea of Rittenhouse's movements... except for a big chunk of time unaccounted for in the middle. So, now.

Jiya looked again at the timing, and at the route they had to take back to the Lifeboat. She would've preferred they just grab Rufus and haul him the hell out of there by the most direct route, but they were trying to avoid crossing their own paths except for the planned times. Past Wyatt, past Flynn, and past Lucy _should_ be at the studio right about now, but... present-them could be wrong about the timing. Their arrival from the present could already have changed something subtle, but critical. Someone on the street turning left instead of right, or... Or seeing present-them could send one of past-them running, for some reason, in which case encountering more present-thems _probably_ wouldn't help.

But other than that, nothing could possibly go wrong.

She already had this memorized. She folded the sheet and stuffed it down her bodice. She'd insisted on bringing a reticule, but the cue sheet was more, um, accessible where it was.

Wyatt muttered under his breath, then added, "Maybe Flynn got the timing wrong." He glanced at his watch again. "All right, listen. Maybe Rufus took..."

Whatever else he said faded out of Jiya's hearing. She reached out, grabbed Rufus's wrist, and yanked him into the alley.

The warmth of his skin under her fingers was like an electric shock. She was shaking. He barely had time to gasp out her name before she pulled his head down and crushed her mouth against his.

His lips, warm and chapped, his fingers, insistent against her hair, his body, firm and _alive_ against hers. She was overwhelmed. She was wrecked. Her horror at the soft whimper that escaped her was salved by his low groan.

" _Rufus_ ," she whispered against his mouth.

Then she pulled back and fiercely blinked back her tears. "You damned _idiot_ , I told you not to come!"

He stared at her. Her gratification that he looked equally dazed could wait.

"I _know_ you saw my message about the Lifeboat," she added.

Rufus glanced between her and Wyatt. Wyatt, Jiya was startled to see, was also a little teary-eyed. He grabbed Rufus in what looked like a bone-crushing hug. "It is so good to see you," he muttered.

"Um... okay." Rufus gingerly hugged back. "I'm... glad to see you too? I saw you like an hour ago." He stepped back when Wyatt finally released him. "... wait. When did you _shave?_ "

He looked between the two of them.

"You're about to walk into the Bison Horn and find me," Jiya said. "I yell at you. I ask why you came. I explain that I've learned to control my visions and I know this is where I see you die, every time I try to leave. We argue over whether I'm coming back with you. Emma and Jessica show up with their goons, trap us in the saloon, we shoot our way out, I save you from the thug I've seen killing you over and over _and over_ again— which is why I left that message _in the first place_ — only to have Emma shoot you in the throat as we leave. You die." She crossed her arms and stared at him fiercely. "We go home. We get a visit from a future Wyatt and Lucy. They give us the beginning of what we need to know to go back in our own timeline. I figure out the rest. And here we are."

He was staring at her, mouth open. "What? No. No, that's not possible, we can't—"

"We _made_ it possible," she snapped. "Because you came here and got yourself killed."

"Hey," Wyatt said. "Let's talk about this on the way. Get out of sight."

Right. If the universe really did have it in for Rufus...

Then Jiya would know very, very soon.

She took the lead, and knew Wyatt would get Rufus to follow.

"Wait," Rufus said behind her. "No, I can't just— what about the others?"

"Lucy and Flynn are on their way to find past Lucy and Flynn and me and explain the plan. Then they'll find past Jiya and she'll pilot them home in the Lifeboat. The four of us take you back to our present in our Lifeboat."

"And... just, uh, when is your present?" Rufus asked, nervous.

"September 8 th , 2017." She motioned for them to stay back as she peered around a corner.

"So I just... lose four months out of my life?"

She turned and confronted him. A heady mix of relief and anger was threatening to overwhelm her. "As opposed to the _rest_ of it?" she snapped. "Yes! Weren't you _listening?_ _You die!_ "

"I—"

"I saw you die, which is why I told you not to come, and you did anyway, and you died, so we had to come back for you, and I have _no_ _fucking clue_ if we can get you back home safely or if you just keep dying here!" She pulled her voice back from a shout.

He stared down at her, looking pained. She glared back, waiting for his next argument.

"All right," he said finally. "Let's go home."

"Great." Wyatt ruthlessly steered him forward, which gave Jiya a moment to recover from this overwhelming rush of relief and terror and hope.

Three blocks later she saw Emma at the end of the street.

She shoved Rufus backward into the alley they'd just left, pushed him to the ground, and covered his body with hers. "Jiya!" he hissed. "What are you—"

" _Emma_."

She pulled her gun out of her reticule as Wyatt slid past them and looked around the corner. She waited for what felt like an eternity, heart pounding.

"I don't see her," Wyatt murmured. "C'mon."

Jiya hurried across the street with Rufus's hand clasped in hers—

A sharp _crack_ rang out.

 _NononononoNO_ — she whirled— shoved Rufus behind her— she didn't see blood—

A man glared and swore at her in Cantonese as up the street, another man grabbed the box he'd just dropped.

"Jiya?" Rufus tugged her gently into motion. "Jiya, c'mon."

She stared at him when they reached the protection of the next alley. She felt— she didn't—

Oh God, she was losing it.

"Hey," he said softly. "Hey, I'm here, all right? We're gonna get home."

She stared at him and stroked his face, not trusting herself to speak.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"You— you are?"

"I'm not... I'm not sorry I came, but I'm sorry—" He looked her up and down and shook his head. "All of it, Jiya."

"Jiya," Wyatt said firmly. "Jiya, we have to go. It's not safe here. You know that."

"Right," she muttered, numbly, and stumbled into motion again, still holding Rufus's hand tightly behind her.

By the time they reached their Lifeboat, she wasn't sure what was real any more. Was this all a hallucination?

Rufus stared up at it. "So, do we jump back and I come back for the others, or—"

"You're not coming back here." It came out sharper than she intended. She realized she'd grabbed his hand convulsively. "We're all going together."

"Jiya, no. The last time we did that—"

"Connor upgraded it. There's no room for an extra seat, but... it can carry five safely." Jiya punched in the hatch code. "That was Lucy's price for learning to pilot. Here." She handed him the letter from Connor.

"Lucy's a _pilot?_ "

"Um... no. But she's learning." She was up to double digits of the number of landings she'd survived now. As a percentage of _total_ attempts...

Well. Anyway.

Jiya leaned down and helped Rufus up, not because he needed help but for the excuse to hold on to him.

She was shaking. She couldn't believe they'd made it this far. Any minute now she'd wake up, or worse, he'd _die_...

"Hey." He cupped her face in his hand, his eyes wide and dark and tender. "Jiya. I'm here. I'm here."

Wyatt stuck his head in the door. "I'm gonna keep watch," he said. "Out here. I'll just, uh... close this—"

"No," Jiya said. "We could be waiting a while. It'll be miserable in here."

Wyatt grimaced, then shrugged. "Whatever you want. I hear nothing."

Rufus sank down in the pilot's seat. She hiked up all her layers so she could straddle his lap. She kissed him, slow and desperate at the same time, and wondered if she could just melt into him if she tried hard enough.

One kiss became two became... she lost count. She tried to lose a lot of things, in the slow slide of his hand up and down her back, in the taste of him, in the warmth of his body through their clothes. She tried to lose all the memories of the last four months of pain and grief. It didn't work, of course. But damn if the attempt didn't feel like heaven.

He finally broke away, gasping. She bent and pressed her lips to the pulse point in his neck, then slid sideways until—

There. Right there, under her mouth, his skin _whole_ , not ruptured and giving up his life's blood. She kissed the spot again, and then again. Then she pulled back and put her hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat strong and steady under her fingers.

She shuddered. Then she swallowed hard and forced back tears.

If this was a dream, she didn't want to wake up.

He looked at her, and she realized he understood far more of what she wasn't saying than she'd expected. He pulled her close, not for another kiss, just held her against him. She unabashedly clung to him, felt his breathing, felt his _thereness_.

"Rufus," she choked out. Her tears ran over. She buried her face against his shoulder. He just held her more tightly.

Something rustled outside. She jumped back and spun, grabbing her gun and keeping herself between Rufus and the door. The noise came again. Something small, she realized. Like a squirrel.

"Uh, Wyatt?" she called softly, anyway.

"Everything's fine."

She turned back to Rufus, stunned all over again by the fact that he was right in front of her.

"I missed you," she got out through fresh tears. "I missed you, you foolish damn ass, and it hurt worse than I ever thought it could."

" _Jiya_." He pulled her back into his lap, sideways this time, and cradled her head against his shoulder.

"I held you as you died." She didn't know where all her anger had gone. Transmuted into shock, apparently. "And then we had to leave you there."

His arm tightened around her. He kissed her hair, her forehead, whatever he could reach. "We're going home. It's okay."

"I'm not sure you're going to survive the trip." Admitting it _cut_ her, but he had to know. He had to. "The universe put out a hit on you."

"We'll get home," he repeated. It was so much like his optimism, right before he died, that she felt sick. "And you can call me a foolish damn ass every day for as long as you want, all right?"

"I was going to do that anyway." It came out ragged. She straightened up and sniffled, then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "We should, uh..." She cleared her throat. "We should do the pre-flight. It's gotten a little longer."

"You _did_ this?" He stared at the console in undisguised amazement once she'd gotten everything up and running. "Jiya, this is— this is incredible. This is _beautiful_."

"I did have a little help from future Wyatt and Lucy—"

"Which was basically just help from future Jiya," now-Wyatt said.

Jiya smirked. "I thought you heard nothing."

"I heard the sound of you not giving yourself enough credit."

They got the Lifeboat as ready as they could. She wasn't sure how long they waited; she'd, ironically, lost all track of time. Finally she heard Wyatt shift. "Someone's coming," he muttered.

Jiya flattened herself against the inside of the hatch, gun in hand. "Get down," she hissed to Rufus. A vision of a stray bullet flashing in through the open door, hitting his jugular, blood pouring all over the controls—

She shook her head. No. Not a vision, _not_ a vision, just an image—

She gestured fiercely at him. Obediently, he crouched near the console.

Wyatt relaxed. "It's them."

Running footsteps. Jiya peeked out to see Lucy in the lead, Flynn close on her heels. His longer legs made up for the fact that he was still limping a little. "Wyatt!" Lucy called. "Is— _did_ —"

Rufus raised his head.

Gasping, laughing, Lucy sprinted the remaining distance. Wyatt held out a hand to help her, but Jiya was pretty sure Lucy just _jumped_ into the Lifeboat. She grabbed Rufus, actually dragging him sideways in the force of her excitement. "Thank God," Lucy gasped. "Oh God, Rufus. Oh thank God." She laughed, and squeezed him tighter, swaying back and forth with him.

Wyatt helped Flynn into the Lifeboat and then climbed up himself. The Lifeboat was incredibly cramped; Jiya was pressed into the wall by Rufus and Lucy, and she had Flynn's elbow in her side. He was almost bent double under the low ceiling.

Wyatt closed the door. "All right. Let's go."

Rufus and Lucy broke apart. Rufus reached for the controls.

"What are you doing?" Jiya asked.

"Getting us home. Should I... not be doing that?"

"The return trip might be rough. And I've practiced this kind of jump, and you haven't."

"All right," he said after a second. "She's all yours. But if you let me help, I'll know for next time."

 _Next time._ She smiled up at him, and blinked back more tears. Geez, she could go into business as a saltwater sprinkler at this rate. "Okay."

She initiated the start-up sequence, showing him what was different. "Easy on the targeting calibration. She's a bit delicate now."

"Oh, is she?" Rufus's smile was warm as he reached past her to flip the switches above her head. He brushed the small of her back. She couldn't help leaning into his touch.

"But, you know," she added. "Tough as always."

"Now the seed loop initiation sequence?" He pressed a kiss to the base of her neck.

She nodded. She reached past _him_ to double-check that the auto-generated parameters looked sensible, and kissed the corner of his mouth. He turned, slid one hand on her hip, and kissed her full on, slow and thorough, as he keyed in the targeting sequence without looking.

She leaned into him and curled one hand behind his neck, letting their kiss become _more_ as she brought up the grav trains. And then, more, again.

Someone shifted uncomfortably. With the two brain cells Jiya was willing to devote to the matter, she could see how, given the personal history of the other three, they could find this a little awkward.

But she just didn't _care_.

She turned fully into Rufus and slid her other hand to the small of his back. He made a soft noise—

"Any time now, guys," Wyatt muttered. Then— "Someone's coming!"

Rufus swung into the empty seat as she strapped herself in. She heard shouting outside— She turned to look—

She caught Wyatt's eye as he grabbed on to the crash webbing Connor had rigged up. He suddenly looked— scared. Solemn. And she remembered what he'd risked on this trip.

"We'll find her," she told him, fiercely, fresh off the victory of saving Rufus. "I _promise_."

Rufus looked puzzled. Jiya turned back and flipped the last switch.

She had to tune out the sounds of people trying valiantly not to be sick as she fought to get them back to the present, _their_ present. It was hard— it felt harder than it should— what if— what if— was this because—

They landed solidly in the present. She flipped the three switches she needed to and swiveled to look—

Rufus was sitting right behind her.

Her hands shook as she powered the Lifeboat down. Flynn opened the hatch— Rufus scrambled out, eyes wide— Wyatt had to wait impatiently for the other three to move—

Her legs wobbled when she stood. Was this real? Was any of it real?

Would they find anyone in—

She slid down as Connor shouted and grabbed Rufus in another bone-crushing hug. Her legs almost collapsed under her. Flynn unceremoniously grabbed her to keep her upright.

"Thanks."

He grunted.

"Hold on." She _had_ to know— if— had to know _now_ — the couch would attract too much attention—

He frowned at her. "What?"

"No— literally, _hold on_ —"

She let herself fall across time and space.

She snapped back to herself with a gasp. Flynn was staring down at her, visibly stunned and—

 _concerned?_ Was _that_ the word she wanted?

But he hadn't dropped her, and that was all she cared about just then. "Thanks," she managed, got a look of reproach in return, and stood on her own. She turned to Rufus— staggered— Flynn steadied her with one huge hand on her shoulder, and she could practically _hear_ him rolling his eyes—

"You're back," she gasped out to Rufus. "I see you—"

His eyes widened as he realized what she was telling him. He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her hard, then tugged her up against him. This time she could feel him shaking.

Over his shoulder, she saw Wyatt and Connor. "Do you know who Grace is?" Wyatt demanded, low and urgent.

Connor looked at him like he was an idiot. "Your daughter? That Grace?"

"And where is she now?" Wyatt stared fixedly at him.

"With her grandparents at the base in Wyoming..." Connor looked at him, inviting an explanation.

But Wyatt just tipped his head back, mouth falling open in relief, and ran both hands through his hair as his shoulders slumped.

They ended up around the kitchen table with food in front of them. They laughed and drank and toasted and celebrated long into the night. She skipped her own chair in favor of perching sideways on Rufus's lap all night, resting her head against his shoulder. He was warm. He was solid. He was _there_.

If this were a dream, she was going to live it as long as she could.

She felt numb with relief, dazed with disbelief, and drugged with happiness. She hadn't let herself believe this would work. Until she'd seen him in her visions, again, she hadn't let herself believe it _had_ . _How_? How had they thwarted the universe like this?

She glanced across at Flynn, and remembered a conversation they'd had here in this kitchen, not that long ago. About how she saw visions of things that should've been impossible, made possible through new technology.

 _So_ , she thought. _I guess I just made the impossible, possible_. Until they'd had timeline recursion, she couldn't have seen any possible future that they needed it to reach.

Flynn. She'd had most of her attention on Rufus, of course, but she'd noticed that even Flynn was smiling more than she'd ever seen.

"I'd like to make a toast," she murmured after a while. She hadn't spoken loud, but everyone immediately quieted. She reached for her glass. She'd switched to tea at some point, apparently. Made sense; tired as she was, more booze was probably a bad idea.

Lucy looked at her expectantly.

Jiya sighed. She wasn't big on speeches. But she'd started this one.

"To Future Wyatt and Lucy," she said. "Who gave up..."

What had happened to them? What _would_ happen to them? Had they made it home? Had they winked out of existence as soon as the present team had brought Rufus back?

"... a lot," she finished simply. "So _we_ could have a better future."

The others were quiet for a moment. "To... Future Wyatt and Lucy," Rufus said. The others echoed him, and they clinked glasses.

" _And_ ," Lucy added, "to Future Jiya, who made all this possible in the first place."

They clinked glasses again.

Lulled by the warmth of the kitchen and the warmth of Rufus, she dozed. She woke when Rufus shifted. "Hey," he murmured.

She blinked and looked up. The dishes were cleared from the table, and Wyatt was just washing out the sink. Lucy and Flynn had an empty wine bottle between them; Lucy's eyes were heavy, and she'd slid down a bit in her chair. She was staring at her empty glass with a soft, dreamy smile. Connor was beaming at them all.

And Rufus...

She turned to look at him. "Hey."

He tightened his arm around her. "Bed?"

She looked at him, stunned all over again by the miracle of his presence. "Yeah," she told him. "Yeah."

"Right." He managed to nudge her off his lap and stand, all without taking his arm out from around her. "Well. We will, um, see you in the morning—"

"Think it'll be that early?" Connor muttered.

Jiya tried to muster the energy to glare at him, but couldn't.

"And, um." Rufus looked at them all. "Thank you," he said quietly. " _Thank_ you."

"Don't mention it," Wyatt said.

"Because you have already about seventeen times," Flynn muttered.

But then Flynn got up, gave Lucy a hand up, and clapped Rufus on the shoulder. "Good to have you back," he added, roughly and gruffly, then cleared his throat and headed down the hall.

Rufus stared after him. "... did we bring back the wrong Flynn?"

Lucy gave Rufus another fierce hug, her eyes squeezing tight, then followed Flynn.

Jiya led Rufus to her—

To _their. Their. Their_ bedroom, and grabbed some clothes—

Wait, but Rufus's—

She teared up all over again— God, she really had to stop doing that— when she saw that someone had brought the two boxes that had held Rufus's stuff through their last two moves, and put them at the foot of the other bunk.

"Pajamas," she muttered. "Shower with me?"

He followed her towards the bathroom. "Wait." He looked around. "There are _two_ bathrooms? What is this place, the Hilton?"

He closed the door behind him. She rested against him for a moment, then sighed, straightened up, and reached for the fastening of that damn purple gown that she didn't want to ever see again.

It still had his blood on it, didn't it.

He caught her hands. "Let me?" he asked softly.

She nodded.

He took his time about it, first helping her out of the dress, then unfastening her bustle, then undoing her corset. He let his hands trail down her back, and she shivered. She started to turn to face him, but he slid his fingers into her hair and gently pulled out a pin. He pressed his mouth to the join of her shoulder and neck, and stroked down her side to her hip. Jiya leaned into his touch.

Piece by piece, he took all her hair down. His hands on her felt better than Jiya had— dared dream, and they hadn't even...

"I had a lot of time to think about all the things I wanted us to do with, to, each other if I ever saw you again," she mumbled. "And now I'm asleep on my feet."

Not too asleep on her feet not to gasp when his hand brushed the side of her breast. "We have time," he murmured. Then his voice changed. "There's time, now. There's all the time we need."

It took Jiya a moment to place the quote. "I guess we'll see about that."

She winced when she heard how that came out. "I mean, it _was_ a pretty long list," she clarified.

He gave her a slow, lopsided smile that she felt along the length of her. He reached past her and turned on the water. "Join you in a minute."

It was her turn to catch his hands. She ran her thumbs across the backs of his hands. "Let me?" she whispered.

And he did.

When she'd undressed him, she slid her hands slowly up from his hipbones to his chest. He closed his eyes. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, kissed him with a deliberate, unhurried thoroughness, and carefully walked them backwards towards the shower.

Of all the ways she'd imagined this part of their reunion might go, when she'd dared to let herself think of that at all... She'd pictured intense and desperate, or maybe a drawn-out marathon, three and a half years of pent-up need and sheer relief to match. She'd never pictured it as slow, gentle shower sex, the running water covering their low gasps and moans. But it was _perfect_ . She wouldn't have changed it for anything, even though it left her feeling raw. Not physically— _emotionally_. She'd had to be so tough, for so long, and she'd been so alone. Making love with him now tugged at all the barriers she'd constructed for her own survival, leaving her exposed.

But why _wait?_

If there was one thing she'd learned from all this... besides don't let a Rittenhouse spy in the bunker... it was that. Why. Wait?

Then he washed her hair for her, fingers gentle against her scalp, and the part of her brain that didn't go right to sleep worried she might actually melt and run down the drain.

They made it out eventually, before they used up the whole tank's worth of hot water. She knew their teammates wouldn't begrudge them that, not this time.

"Bunk beds," Rufus murmured as he closed the door behind them. His voice had gone low and warm like it always had— always did— after sex. "Just like summer camp."

She didn't ask him what kind of summer camp _he'd_ gone to, but she did give him a look over her shoulder that promised they'd discuss this later.

They arranged themselves in bed, and for the first time in three and a half years, she drifted off to sleep with his arm around her.

#

She woke slowly, aware that she'd had a wonderful dream of Rufus and wanting to let it linger. She basked in the—

She had an arm around her waist.

She rolled over fast, startling him awake. "Oh my God," she managed. "You're _here_."

"... yes?" He looked up at her sleepily.

She closed her eyes and touched her forehead to his. "Three and a half years," she reminded him, trying not to cling to him.

He made an unhappy noise. "I'm sorry we didn't get there sooner."

"Don't," she whispered. "You're alive. That's enough." She kissed him. Then kissed him more insistently. Then burst into tears, which kind of derailed where she'd been going with that.

He held her close, his mouth pressed against the top of her head, and rocked her gently until she calmed down. She dozed, woke again, and propped herself up on one elbow to watch him.

About five minutes later, eyes still closed, he murmured, "I know you're staring at me."

She smiled and kissed the corner of his mouth. Since he was awake and all.

He tugged her on top of him. She fell asleep with their legs tangled together and her head against his chest, listening to the reassuring sound of his heartbeat.

This time, when she woke, he was the one watching her. "How hard have you been pushing yourself lately?" he asked quietly.

"As hard as I needed to to get you back." She met his gaze defiantly.

He looked over at her, sad and a lot of other things. "Jiya." He spread his hand across her torso, between her breast and her hip.

"You'd've done the same," she said. "You _did_ do the same. You came after me without caring what it cost you, Rufus."

He closed his eyes. Kissed her again.

They weren't going to talk through this in an hour, or a day, or even a week. But _he was here_. They could talk. Everything else was secondary.

He glanced down. "What's that?" He gently cupped her breast— she pushed into his touch— then realized what he was looking at.

"Oh," she said. "I, um. Got that at our last base. Things were..." She swallowed. "Hard."

He propped himself up on one elbow to rub his thumb across her tattoo, then trail light kisses after his thumb. That turned into round two, which— while Jiya wasn't complaining _at all_ — did mean that she had to wait a bit for them to be sufficiently... non-post-coital.

But Rufus asked her to tell him what had happened while he was dead. He held her close, and she told him what she could bear to say right then. Then she turned over in his arms and looked at him.

"Rufus?"

"Mmm."

She hesitated. "You remember when you said that..." She glanced down, then back up. "That the time you had left, you wanted to spend it with me?"

"Of course I remember. That was like three days ago for me."

"And, um..." She couldn't get the words out.

"I still mean it," he said, looking up at her with a little smile. "If that's what you were wondering."

She smiled, and squeezed his hand.

"Want to watch—"

She cleared her throat. "Actually, I was wondering if you... um. If you might want to... get... married?"

The smile slid right off his face. He stared at her.

His mouth fell open.

"Oh, God, Rufus, I— I shouldn't have— Look, it can be whatever, _we_ can be—"

"Are you," he said, staring at her, "proposing to me?"

"Wh— _yes_ , what else did you think I—"

"I thought I would— I thought I would— have to get up my courage for, for, for _months_ , for _years_ , to— and— now you're just— I—" He sputtered to a stop.

He tried again: " _Yes_ ," he whispered. "Jiya— I— _yes_ . _Hell yes_ . If— you're sure _you—_ want _me_ —?" He looked astonished.

They had issues still to work out. He'd missed four months that had left an indelible shadow on her, on the whole team. She needed him to take that seriously. And they'd been apart for three and a half years in her timeline, and she'd told the truth when she told him she wasn't the woman he knew any more.

But why _wait?_

"I can think of nothing in this world I want more," she told him.

For a moment, he looked like he'd been hit over the head with a tennis racket. Then he rolled her onto her back and kissed the hell out of her.

"I have a ring," she told him, next time they came up for air.

"You picked out your own ring?"

"... oh." She, actually, had not considered this beyond 'you propose with a ring.' And it was definitely a woman's ring. "I... didn't think this through."

"Is it a ring you like?"

"It's beautiful." She tugged a cardboard box out from under the bed and rooted around inside until she found what she wanted. It would have been easier if she'd been willing to let go of him, but that was non-negotiable. She showed him the opal ring she'd found in that secondhand store in Gainesville.

"Do you want this—" He tried again. "Do you want an engagement ring, and if so, do you want this one, or do you want me to get one? Or do you want us to pick out a different one together?"

His comprehensive covering of the bases made her smile. "I like this one," she told him.

So he tugged it out of the box and slid it onto her finger. Then he brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. "I love you," he whispered.

"Hold that thought..."

His eyebrows went up.

She leaned over the box again. "I do have something _else_ for you..."

She found the bag and handed it to him. He stared, then let out a shout of laughter.

They eventually dressed and made it out to the common areas of the house. "Well, look who finally got out of bed," Wyatt said, but his smile belied his dry tone.

Lucy got up mid-sentence to hug Rufus.

"So, uh," Wyatt added. "We did a lot of catching up last night, but I figured we could catch Rufus up on the missions that—"

Lucy stepped back from Rufus and happened to glance down at his and Jiya's joined hands. Her high-pitched noise of excitement echoed in her mug, and she almost choked on her coffee.

Wyatt and Flynn looked at each other, confused.

"Oh my God, congratulations!" Lucy hugged Jiya, then Rufus again. "Ahhhhhh!" She was having trouble getting words out, but her face had lit up like a radium dial.

The noise brought Connor in from the garage, and he hugged them, eyes going big when he realized— Wyatt hugged them, doing the backslapping thing with Rufus— Lucy hugged them _again_ —

Flynn stood uncomfortably at the edge of the group, and shook Rufus's hand, awkward, but earnest. He turned to Jiya and reached for her hand. She pulled him into a hug instead. His choked noise of shock was comical. If she'd had to approximate the spelling, it would've been something like 'glrrk.'

They settled down eventually. Jiya felt giddy, and dizzy with the change from how she'd spent the last four months feeling. She'd _done it_ , she'd saved Rufus, she'd _thwarted_ fate—

"Is that... Yoda?" Wyatt asked. "Why are you carrying that around?"

Rufus glanced down. "Oh, yeah. Um, this is basically, this is _my_ engagement ring." He looked up at them, face serious.

Wyatt stared down at him like _Rufus_ was the weird alien.

Then he hugged Rufus again. "God, Rufus. It's good to have you back."

#

She couldn't remember the last time they'd all been so happy together. Maybe never.

It wasn't just getting Rufus back. It was that Rufus hadn't lived through the last four months, which had been so hard on all of them. Between that and him having the weight of his impending death off his shoulders, he was a desperately needed dose of optimism. That was in addition to the... _triumph_ was the only word for it, of having him back.

And he and Jiya were engaged! Lucy _knew_ Jiya had barely been able to believe this might work, and yet she'd apparently been holding onto that ring since her trip to Gainesville. The whole thing made Lucy want to laugh and cry.

They basically picked up where they'd left off last night in the kitchen, with coffee instead of alcohol. Garcia hadn't technically joined them, but he was reading in the back half of the living room, right on the other side of the kitchen, draped sideways across a chair in a way that should've been really improbable for someone so big. Jiya was sitting sideways in Rufus's lap again, and Lucy got the distinct impression that Jiya a.) thought a separate chair was just too far away and b.) didn't care what any of them thought about this. She looked— more than content, she looked _victorious_.

And why not? She'd bent the laws of physics to her will to save the man she loved. It should've been impossible. She'd done it anyway.

Lucy tuned back into the conversation: "... and Flynn, was, uh, looking after Grace," Wyatt said, a little stiffly.

Rufus frowned. "Who's Grace?"

"My daughter."

Rufus choked, spit coffee on the table, and choked again. Instantly, Jiya was up, expression grim, pounding him on the back, until—

"Jiya. Jiya!" Wyatt grabbed her hands. She nearly slugged him. "He's okay. If he's coughing, he can breathe."

Rufus made a painful throat-clearing noise. "Fine," he repeated, sounding like he'd just gargled with nails.

Jiya went still. She looked around. They were all watching her, except Garcia, who had looked up and then gone back to his book when he decided there was no crisis.

She pulled away from Wyatt. "I'm going for a walk," she muttered.

"... do you want company?" Rufus called.

"No!"

Connor turned away to the sink, expression eloquent. Lucy and Wyatt and Rufus looked at each other.

"So, um," Rufus said, after a long silence. "Let's go back to the part where you have a _kid_."

"Jessica was telling the truth," Wyatt muttered.

"Okay..." Rufus said. "That answers like a third of my question. She didn't look five months pregnant when she was here. Also, wouldn't that mean you're not the father?"

Wyatt looked up sharply.

Rufus noticed: "I mean, other-you would be the father."

Lucy let Wyatt explain Emma's taking people out of the past and stashing them in 1930s Iowa, as well as how Wyatt had ended up with very literal custody of Grace. Lucy was more worried about Jiya. Just when Lucy was thinking of going to look for her, the back door opened and she came in. Her expression was set, but she looked calmer than before.

Lucy's heart hurt to see how Jiya was still terrified of losing Rufus— terrified that maybe she hadn't thwarted fate after all. It was no less painful for being understandable, even rational. They were at war, and their enemy was vicious.

Wyatt cleared his throat. "Rufus, could we talk?"

Rufus looked at him in confusion.

"Alone." Wyatt grabbed two cold beers from the fridge, and hoisted them in invitation. "C'mon, I'll give you the grand tour."

So Rufus followed Wyatt out the back door. Connor and Jiya headed into the Lifeboat bay; they'd been monitoring the aftereffects of their first Time Warp to make sure it hadn't destabilized anything important.

"Shall I fire up the simulator?" Connor asked, when he saw Lucy in the doorway.

She looked at him. He still...? "We have two pilots now."

"Yes, but we don't know what's going to happen in the future."

Lucy's mouth dropped at him saying that in front of Jiya just then, but he wasn't wrong. "Uh, no," she said. "I, uh, have some reading to do."

She joined Garcia in the living room. Rufus and Wyatt stayed outside for over an hour. When they came back inside, they both looked a little uncomfortable, but Wyatt looked _lighter_ than she'd seen him in months.

Denise arrived in late afternoon, rekindling the reunion. They settled around the kitchen table again, after Denise had hugged Rufus several times.

"Wyatt texted me and asked me to bring this," Denise said, when the conversation reached a lull. She reached into her bag with a look of long-suffering in Rufus's direction and of reproach in Wyatt's direction, both of which were utterly unconvincing coupled with her little smile. She handed Rufus a box of Chocodiles. Rufus was just as delighted this time as he'd been in that bar. God, that felt so long ago.

Lucy volunteered to wash the dinner dishes this time. She let the warmth and the happiness from behind her wash over her. But...

When she was done, she excused herself, got her shoes and a coat, and slipped outside. She went to sit on the low rail fence near on of the sheds, and stared up at the stars. They were as brilliant now as they had been the night she and Garcia had fallen asleep on the prairie.

Alone, she gave into the ache that had been slowly building all day, and cried a little, silently.

She felt like a terrible person. At least she was out here, where she wouldn't... interrupt anything. Make anyone else sad. In their happiness, they seemed very far away right now.

About half an hour later she heard a quiet footstep. She hastily rubbed the backs of her hands over her eyes,

"May I, uh, join you?" Garcia asked.

She nodded.

He sat beside her on the fence.

She broke the silence a while later: "I'm happy for them," she said thickly. "I'm so happy for them. But... at the same time, it's..."

"Salt in the wound," he suggested, voice guttural, when she didn't finish.

She looked up at him and nodded. Jiya had gotten Rufus back. Wyatt had— they'd _thought_ he'd gotten Jessica back. But she and Garcia?

He sighed softly.

She leaned against his arm tiredly. He shifted her against his shoulder, and put his arm around her.

"Even odds you're beating yourself up for that," he said, "but that's normal, Lucy. You don't have to sacrifice your own grief to your friends' happiness."

She sniffled. "I know." She sniffled again.

He tightened his arm, and dropped a light kiss on the top of her head.

A startling wave of heat swept all across her, and pooled pleasantly in her breasts and belly. Oh God. What was wrong with her? He clearly hadn't meant anything by it, just as she hadn't meant anything like _that_ by kissing his hair that night he'd been grief-stricken.

The fever receded, but the shock kept the tears at bay.

It felt so good to rest here against him. The war had taught her that safety was illusory, but she felt closer with him than at any other time. Not necessarily because of his skill as a fighter, either. He'd quietly made it very clear that he was there _for her_ , no matter what. And for someone who'd done the things he'd done, he was startlingly nonjudgemental. Maybe at this point he thought it was a waste of energy.

The pleasure of leaning against someone as solid and comforting as he lulled her into waiting. _Another minute_ , she told herself, more than once. _Just one more_.

Finally, she said, "I know what I'm going to do."

She pulled away and looked up at him.

"I'm going to take the Lifeboat back to 1770 or so and kill David Rittenhouse."

He stared down at her, astonished.

"And end this," she finished.

"... Have you lost," he demanded, "your damn _mind?_ "

"What do you mean?"

"What do I _mean?_ I mean this is a terrible idea and you clearly haven't thought it through!"

"You're wrong." Her tone stopped him with his mouth open. "I've been thinking about this a lot lately."

She couldn't watch her friends happy while knowing that that happiness was threatened by something she could prevent. Jiya, Rufus, Wyatt, Garcia: they all deserved better than this.

"How are you even gonna find him? You couldn't last time you tried."

"Maybe that's because later members of Rittenhouse deliberately covered his tracks. Maybe it would be easier back then. I mean, before he even thinks of Rittenhouse, he wouldn't have any reason to hide, right? And I know where we found him before, I know he was a clockmaker... I have leads now."

She looked up at him. He did not look appreciably swayed.

"It'll be over," she added. "All of this, Garcia." She swallowed. "All of it, gone from the very beginning."

"Yeah, along with _you._ "

She shook her head. "That's why it has to be me. If anyone else goes, I'm erased. But if I go, then... I survive."

"And you come back to a world where you never existed!" He sprang to his feet, turned, turned back, and stared down at her. "What exactly is your grand plan for that? Trust me, I've lived off the grid. It's not something you wanna do!"

"I'll take a letter to Connor from Connor," she said. "Once I return to the new timeline, he can help me establish a new identity—"

"If _he_ even exists."

"— and while I'm in the past, I can find documents of historical significance, leave them hidden, and go back for them when I return to the present. I'll have the makings of a new career."

" _Documents of historical significance?_ " he demanded. "Are you serious, Lucy?"

"Yeah, of course I'm serious." His disbelief was starting to make her angry. "Why can't you be reasonable about this?"

"Because I happen to think a world without Lucy Preston in it is a _damn_ poor world, no matter what else it has or doesn't have!"

She stared at him. "One person to take out all of Rittenhouse," she said finally. "It's worth it. Garcia, I wouldn't even _die_."

"No, worse, you'd be walking the world like a ghost, no family, no friends, no one who cares about you, no one who even _knows_ you. It's not _worth_ it." He spat the word like it offended him. "If you're so sure, why are you doing this unilaterally? Why don't you go in there and explain your idea to the rest of the team? How you wanna change their lives? Because you know they would stop you!"

"No. They wouldn't understand." She shook her head. "But _you_ should. This is war. There are casualties. You told me that. You were willing to erase me in 1954—"

He flinched like she'd hit him.

"— to take out Rittenhouse. This is no different."

"I was _wrong_ ," he growled. "Lucy, I was wrong, and we both know it. And you thought so at the time, so you'll understand if I find your change of heart a little unconvincing! And you— _you_ were the one who told _me_ that we had to stop trying to fix the past and focus on the present!"

But he _was_ convinced, she realized suddenly. More than that, he was...

_Frightened?_

He must not understand. "It _would be over_ ," she repeated. "Rittenhouse, gone, never existed. You'd be back with your _family_ , Garcia! Why are you so upset?"

"BECAUSE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT WIPING YOURSELF OUT OF EXISTENCE LIKE YOU'RE DECIDING ON PIZZA TOPPINGS!"

They stared at each other. She hadn't seen him this angry since the night she'd stopped him from killing John.

He stepped closer, and his anger turned to something darker and more serious. "This is too much, Lucy," he said, voice under control again. "Do you understand? You're not the damned sacrificial goat! You don't owe this to anyone!"

Automatically, she started shaking her head. "No—"

"Or, what, you want me to get Wyatt and have him explain that to you? Would you listen to _him?_ "

Her head snapped up. "Don't you dare."

"You're too valuable to do this."

"Valuable? Valuable to you?"

"Valuable _as a person!_ " he snapped. " _On your own!_ Damn it, Lucy, your worth is not measured by the number of people you put before yourself!"

"Whatever I'm worth." She shook her head. "It's not more than all the people Rittenhouse has hurt."

" _Lucy_ —" He stepped forward. They were almost knee to knee, and she had to tilt her head way back to keep eye contact. In the moonlight, his harsh, angry expression was very clear.

"I thought you would understand!" she said—

Abruptly, he sat down and turned towards her.

— "I thought you would _help_ —"

He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her hard.

Her shock was quickly replaced by the heat from before returning tenfold. She grabbed his face— leaned into him— his stubble rough against her palms— His mouth urgent against hers—

She shuddered and remembered and yanked away. She couldn't— couldn't let herself be— "You're just trying to get me to stay," she panted, barely able to... words.

He looked as utterly wrecked as she felt. " _What?_ " he managed.

Oh God. At least, after she'd gone back, when he no longer remembered her, she'd have this one scorching memory.

Someone was coming. Lucy had just enough time to try— try— to look composed before Denise appeared around the side of the garage. With Wyatt, who had his gun drawn, pointing down. And Rufus.

And Jiya and Connor farther back. Oh, wonderful.

"We heard shouting." Denise eyed them.

Wyatt stared suspiciously at Garcia. Had he seen—? No, definitely not. But he'd heard her and Garcia yelling at each other and come with his gun out.

Garcia stared at her, one eyebrow raised, daring her to tell them her plan.

She cleared her throat. "Everything's fine," she said. "We're... fine. All fine."

Denise looked at her in disbelief, and raised one eyebrow. When Lucy didn't say anything else, she turned to Garcia. "Flynn?"

"I can't add anything to that comprehensive summary."

Unwilling to be the center of attention any longer, Lucy slid off the fence and just walked away.

When she came into the house an hour later, no one commented. She didn't see Garcia. She retrieved a book and read in the living room until Connor, the last one up, said good night and turned out the rest of the lights.

She forced herself to read five more pages. She put down the book and listened. She read five more pages. She listened again.

Finally, she pulled her shoes off and crept into the Lifeboat garage.

It was dark and silent. She used her phone to light the way rather than fumble around for the switch and risk someone seeing light under the door and probably knock five things noisily over in the process.

Once she got closer, the glow of the console helped, the equipment still watching for a Mothership jump even when they slept. The ladder had been rolled away; she put her hands on the lip and pulled herself up, proud that she managed it. Then she entered the code, waited for the hatch to slide open, and—

"Hey, Lucy."

She jumped, lost her footing, slid down the front of the Lifeboat, scraped her shins, landed hard, and fell on her ass.

Rufus poked his head out and jumped down much more gracefully.

"I was—" she sputtered. "Ow. I was just, um—"

"Scoping things out so you can go back and carry out a hit on David Rittenhouse?" Rufus offered her a hand up.

She glared up at him.

"Flynn told me," he explained.

She let him give her a little yank to catalyze the standing process. She rubbed her shins.

"Are you gonna tell Denise?" she muttered.

"Not if you don't make me. Here. Let's sit." He pointed to the couch, and turned on one overhead light.

He sat across from her, and waited.

"It's still really good to have you back," she said softly.

He did that side-to-side thing with his head. "Flattery will get you pretty far, but not out of this conversation."

She snorted.

"I know how to end this, Rufus," she said finally. "With just one more trip. Nobody else has to die. I can take out Rittenhouse from the very beginning."

"And then come back to nothing for yourself?" His tone was calm, nonjudgemental, the polar opposite of Garcia earlier.

She shook her head. "What will I have when all this is over?" She sounded bleak even to her own ears.

"You'll have us."

" _Will_ I? There's no guarantee that any of us are going to survive this. We just lived four months without a teammate. I don't want to do that again. I don't want _any_ of us to have to do that again. Especially not Jiya. Once was bad enough." She paused to get herself under control. "I don't want Grace growing up in a bunker hiding from her own mom. I don't want Garcia haunted forever by his slaughtered family."

He watched her for a minute. "Have you asked us what _we_ want?"

"... what do you mean?"

"I'd rather take my chances in a world where we fight side-by-side," he said slowly, "than be ignorant and happy in a world where you went out in a blaze of glory to stop Rittenhouse." He looked up. "And, Jiya. Have you _asked_ her if she wants you to do this in her name?"

"It's not—"

"And I'm guessing even Flynn had something to say about it," he added drily, "from the shouting."

Lucy shook her head. "I watched you and Jiya each try to be selfless in Chinatown. You ended up dead and she ended up... well."

"Well, that's a nice tidy bundle of logical justification for why you want to take the decision out of our hands."

She sighed. "It's not like that, Rufus."

"It _is_ like that, Lucy. I guarantee that none of us want to be unilaterally shunted into some new timeline where we don't remember you."

"Even if it means the end of Rittenhouse?"

"Even then. You know, Jiya told me what I missed from your version of Chinatown," Rufus said. "She told me about your speech. It sounded better than the one in Rudy."

Lucy snorted.

"Did you mean it?" he added.

"Of course I meant it. But that speech got you _killed_."

Rufus shook his head. "You're all missing this. I went willingly. I knew the risk. I died because I was willing to do it if that was the only way to save Jiya. I— don't remember this, but she says I wouldn't leave her behind. That I thought that was an okay price to pay. Everyone's gotta die sometime. If I could do it saving the woman I love?" He shrugged. "There are worse ways."

He glanced sideways at her. "I had a doozy of a conversation with Wyatt earlier," he added. "Please tell me you haven't _all_ spent the last four months quietly blaming yourselves for my death."

Lucy shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Pretty much."

"Ugh, remind me just never to die if this is how my memory gets used," he muttered. "Have you even thought about how that would go? You jump back, it's not like you'd find Rittenhouse right away, if _ever_ , so... we'd just be stuck here. Waiting. For days."

Lucy winced.

"Wyatt would probably try to find and steal the Mothership just to go back and stop you."

She tried to tell herself that nothing that happened in this timeline would matter any more once she'd killed David Rittenhouse, but... she couldn't. The thought of her friends— of _Garcia_ — sitting here, knowing exactly what she was doing and powerless to stop it, knowing that at any second they would be wiped from reality... was agonizing.

"But—"

"You went back with us to find Jiya when she was determined to sacrifice herself for me," Rufus pointed out. "Then you helped get _me_ after I was willing to sacrifice myself for Jiya. Now you expect us all to just sit back and let you sacrifice yourself for us? That kind of makes you an enormous hypocrite."

She couldn't come up with a counter-argument.

 _But I'm so_ tired, she thought.

"If you meant it then," Rufus told her gently. "To Jiya. When you said that we did things together, we'd take out Rittenhouse together. Then... you have to mean it now. To yourself."

She looked at him for a long moment. "Trust a scientist to get _logic_ in my beautiful, self-sacrificing plan," she finally sighed. "Fine."

He smiled.

She felt so used up. She slowly got to her feet. "I guess I should go to bed."

"Do you, uh... want our other bunk for the night?"

"Oh. Um." That was incredibly sweet, considering, but she didn't know which of the three of them would feel most uncomfortable. "No. I'll just sleep in my own bed. And if for some reason... well, Wyatt's in with Connor to give Denise his room, so she has a spare bunk."

"Right, okay." He looked relieved, but she knew the offer had been genuine. "So... you and Flynn are roommates? Like, roommates roommates?"

She looked at him.

"I mean, obviously you are. I'm just... startled? Startled is a good word."

"It... works." She didn't have the energy to defend it, defend _them_ , any further than that tonight. Besides, thinking of her and Garcia and their living arrangements...

"Hey?" she added. "Um... thanks."

His face softened. "No problem. I got a lot of experience talking people out of stupid things at Mason Industries."

She snorted, hugged him tightly, and headed for her own room.

#

Jiya looked up when Rufus opened the door. "Lucy and Flynn had to drag you into their lovers' spat _now_? They _really_ thought that was the best use of your time? I _just_ got you back."

They'd only had one _night_ together so far.

He looked surprised.

She looked away. "I don't like who this war is turning me into," she muttered.

Rufus started to undress. "Flynn was afraid Lucy was going to try to steal the Lifeboat and go back and kill David Rittenhouse before he could found... Rittenhouse."

 _What?_ "Why would she— do you think there was anything to that?"

"Considering I just caught her trying to sneak into the Lifeboat, yeah."

Jiya sat bolt upright.

"It's fine," Rufus told her. "We talked, she changed her mind, I walked her out of the Lifeboat bay myself, locked the door, and here's the key." He held it up, then put it on top of the dresser.

Slowly, Jiya sank back down into the mattress.

"Are... he and Lucy a _thing?_ " Rufus added, sounding dumbstruck.

"They're _some_ kind of thing," she muttered.

"But he's... _Flynn_."

"Look, do you think we could talk about more important things than _Flynn_? Like, maybe, the fact that I told you not to come back to the 1880s and you did anyway?"

She was trying to pick a fight and she knew it. But he didn't look angry, or defensive, or wounded, or anything like that. He sat down beside her. "You said you didn't like who this war was turning you into," he said quietly. "Jiya, if I hadn't gone, I would've turned into someone _I_ didn't like."

"You would've been alive."

He stretched out beside her and gently twined some of her hair around his fingers. "I don't know exactly what happened," he said slowly, "but I know you've been through hell. And I'm so sorry for that. But... you could've left me there."

She sat up so fast her hair pulled before he had a chance to release it. "And leave me living with the pain of losing you? When there was a chance to _save_ you?"

He just looked at her.

"... damn you," she finally muttered, and sank back down. "And your logical consistency."

He wrapped his arm around her waist and rested his chin against her shoulder. "That's the second version of that I've gotten in like an hour."

She turned to look at him more fully. She trailed her fingertips down the side of his face, the roughness of his stubble. Then she just barely brushed her lips against his. "I can still think of more important things we could be talking about," she whispered.

"Oh?" His voice went low and warm. He kissed the corner of her mouth. "Like what?"

She turned over and twined one arm around his neck. "Oh, like..." She kissed his bottom lip. "The fact that we're in bed together..." His top lip. "And you didn't bother with pajamas." A lingering kiss, full on his mouth.

He rolled them, supporting his weight on his knees and his forearms. He bent his head to press his mouth against the sensitive spot at the bottom of her neck. "I'm listening..." he murmured.

#

Garcia was reading in bed. When she opened the door, he looked up inquiringly.

She closed the door behind her. "You son of a bitch."

He looked at her in disbelief. "You thought I was just gonna sit idly by as you annihilated yourself?" He put a bookmark in the book and laid it on the desk.

"Clearly, whatever I thought about you, I was wrong," she muttered, digging her pajamas out of the bottom drawer.

She heard him sit up. "Lucy, you can't honestly tell me this is what you _want_."

She turned, hands on her hips. "What I _want_ doesn't matter any more, Garcia. This is _war_."

Rufus was right, she really was an enormous hypocrite, because she'd already told him she wouldn't do it and yet here she was arguing with Garcia.

"What I _want_ —" she added.

The weight of the day, of the whole war, hit her like a sack of bricks. She turned away so he couldn't see her face.

"What I want is for this to be _over_ and I'm so tired and I don't know how much longer I can do this," she choked out to the bed post. "And it would've been over, Garcia. It _would've_ been."

Her eyes filled with tears. She covered her eyes with her hand, sank to the bed, then slid to the floor. She buried her face in her knees.

He made some wordless noise and came to sit beside her. She looked up at him, finally mute in the acuteness of her misery. He shifted closer and turned towards her. She leaned against him, solid bulwark that he was, and he wrapped one arm around her back. She buried her face against his chest, tucking her head under his chin. He held her close as she wept.

She wasn't sure what exactly she was grieving, but she knew that she was. Her old life, maybe, finally accepted as permanently, irrevocably lost. Her old _self_. After Chinatown...

After Chinatown, she'd understood what they were facing, even more clearly than she had after her six weeks of captivity. It turned out, getting Rufus back didn't change any of that. It just meant they were facing it alongside him, again.

As her tears tapered off, she felt moisture against the top of her head. He let go with one arm for a moment, and his wrist brushed against her hair. Then he held her tightly again.

When she was out of tears, she didn't immediately move. She felt out of everything else, too. Used up. Weak. Silly. It took her a minute or two to pull back just far enough to look up at him. A helpless, pathetic look, she was afraid, but she didn't have anything else right now.

He leaned back far enough to grab a tissue. As she halfheartedly dried her face, he stared down at her, tired, worried, tender. She half-thought, half-hoped he might lean down and kiss her again. He didn't, so she didn't try, either. Instead, he brushed her hair back over her shoulders, away from the lingering dampness on her face where it wanted to stick.

"I mean I know you and Wyatt are seasoned soldiers," she muttered, "and you're used to this, but..."

He shook his head when she didn't continue. "I know, Lucy," he said very quietly. "What it's like to be tired of war."

She looked up at him.

"I didn't stay a soldier because I _liked_ it. I stayed a soldier because I was good at it, because—" His mouth twisted.

"Because you could help people," she supplied. His file had not only revealed him helping people, it had shown him almost always fighting for the underdog.

He didn't agree, but he didn't argue. "But you're not alone. You have, much as it pains me to say it, a team."

" _Does_ it actually pain you to say that?"

His lips quirked into a rueful little smile like they sometimes did when she called him out on his bullshit. "And, uh." He glanced down, and touched his tongue to his lip. "You do have... me." He glanced up hesitantly. "As long as you'll, uhhh... let me."

She nodded. "I know," she whispered.

He was quiet for a moment. "It wasn't that long ago that I... didn't have the energy to fight any more, either. I was willing to sacrifice myself, just like you. To end this. And you... stopped me."

"I showed you another way. But I don't see one now."

"We'll find one." His voice, firm, softened: "Lucy— I don't wanna tell you what to do."

"You sure about that?"

Another rueful look. Then: "But I don't— want you to do _this_ . You don't—" His voice shook. "Lucy, _please_."

She looked up at him.

"You've trusted me far more than I had any right to," he added softly. "Can you trust me that you don't need to do this?"

Rufus had pointed out her hypocrisy. Garcia was making a far more personal argument. There was probably a reason she'd let Rufus talk her around to his point of view more easily than she'd believed Garcia that she didn't owe this to anyone.

She nodded jerkily.

The way he relaxed in relief told her just as much about what she meant to him as that kiss had— and that was too much for her to take right now. She had to look away.

They were silent for a long time.

He'd glanced sideways at her twice before he said, "About, uh... before."

Then he stopped for so long that she looked up.

"I'm—" he began. He licked his lip again, hesitation clear in his expression.

"You terrified me," he blurted. "But that's not how I, uh, wanted that to—" He swallowed. "For that part— Lucy, I'm... sorry."

She studied him. She could remind him, of course, that she had kissed him back with just as much fervor. Or she could take refuge in a pretended offense at his apologizing for kissing her, for something they'd both enjoyed. It would be easier.

But she also knew what he meant.

Neither of them had been ignorant of what was happening. But whatever they were was— comforting, maybe comfortable, at a time when comfort was scarce in both their lives. Whatever else that kiss had been, it had not been _comfortable_. Now he'd changed things. Could the genie go back in the bottle?

"It's okay," she said quietly. She watched him, watched him watch her, his expression for once inscrutable. They'd both known what was happening, but he'd still startled the hell out of her. Months of living side by side, and not once had he given any indication that that was on his mind. If not for her plan, how long would it have been?

And she knew that if she let the subject drop, he would, too.

"I think I'd, uh..." Her turn to hesitate and trip over her words. She cleared her throat. "I'd like to do that again. I mean, if... if you do. But not tonight." There. Her face felt hot, but she'd gotten it out.

He made a noise of rueful agreement with her last point. Tonight... she just had nothing _left_. Not exactly the right frame of mind in which to start making out with him. He deserved better than for her to want him just as comfort and distraction, as refuge from the war. No matter what her body had to say on the subject.

She also thought that if she _did_ turn to him, even for that reason, he'd let her. Which was why she didn't.

"And I'm, uh, sorry I was an ass about Wyatt," he added after a few moments, sounding a little more at ease.

"A reassuring note of familiarity in an otherwise jarring evening," she muttered.

It had been an exhausting, long, emotional day. She was falling asleep where she sat. He stood, and held out his hands to help her up while she was still searching for energy to move at all.

She let him pull her to her feet. She hung on to his hands and leaned against him, resting her head against his chest and sliding her arms around his waist. He wrapped one arm around her back and cradled the back of her neck with his other hand.

Maybe he loved her. But what was certain was that he'd promised to be beside her until the end of this.

"We'll find another way." His voice rumbled in his chest and against her ear.

For the moment, she let herself believe him.

#

The phone woke her.

She fumbled sleepily for it. She'd meant to silence it before bed, and now it had woken both her and Garcia. Was it Rufus or Wyatt? They'd both gone to the Wyoming base for a few days to visit Rufus's family and Wyatt's daughter, leaving Lucy, Jiya, and Garcia to chase Rittenhouse if they jumped.

Oh God. Had something happened out there?

But it was a number she didn't recognize. "I'm pretending to be dead and I still get telemarketers," she muttered, rejecting the call and turning off the ringer. "Sorry."

She closed her eyes.

The screen lit up again. She frowned. Same number.

"Hello?" she said, cautiously.

"Put Flynn on," a familiar voice said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Peaches & Herb's "Reunited."
> 
> Other notes in almost chronological order:
> 
> Thanks to https://twitter.com/emilynthephoto for introducing me to Ms. Lopez de la Cruz!
> 
> I actually am not entirely convinced that Flynn wouldn’t remember the conversation with Wyatt in 1.06 as we saw it happen, because it happened chronologically before Jessica’s resurrection. I honestly have no idea how that would work, nor what the journal would say post 2.03.
> 
> The presence of a USGS outpost/hidden DHS bunker out in the middle of the Oglala National Grassland is fictional, as far as I know or want to. The road out of there, however, is very real.
> 
> We’ll say the dates of the Perseids are a little… flexible.


	9. A New Covenant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In those days they shall no longer say:
> 
> 'The parents have eaten sour grapes,  
> and the children’s teeth are set on edge.'
> 
> But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge."
> 
> \-- Jeremiah 31:29-30, NRSV
> 
>  
> 
> **trigger warnings:  
> **
> 
> **on-screen:** graphic violence, murder, child abuse, abduction, and forced institutionalization;  
>  **references:** suicidal ideation

She sat on their front stoop and stared at her dirty sandals.

They were getting too small. They pinched her feet when she walked. It hurt, but Mama and Papa had enough to worry about. She wasn't going to bother them about her _shoes_.

She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

A stranger was coming up the cracked front walk. A pretty lady, probably older than Mama, but without the tired look all the ladies around here that age had. Real nice clothes, too, not like anyone wore around here.

The lady stopped and looked down. "What's wrong?"

Sniffle. "My baby brother's sick."

Her _baby_ brother. When Kevin'd been born, Mama had smiled wider than Jessie had ever seen before or since, all lit up and happy like maybe everything was okay for once. Papa'd carried the little squirming bundle around so proudly, showing it— him— off to everyone. "Sweetpea, this is your baby brother," he'd told her, squatting down so she could see. "Make sure you take good care of him, okay?"

Jessie had nodded solemnly, staring down at the interloper. Had they really _needed_ this?

But Mama was so happy, and Papa was so proud. It had been clear right from the beginning which of the Cody kids was the more wanted one. Not that they ever said anything or did anything. Jessie knew she was lucky to have good parents who loved her _and_ each other. How many of the kids in her class could say that?

It was just— it was just— she could see.

"Mama, why didn't you want a girl?" she'd asked once.

Mama had looked down, a little startled, but too tired to protest. "Oh, love, girls have it harder in this world," she'd said quietly. She'd ruffled Jessie's hair. "I wanted better for my kids. But I wouldn't trade you. You know that, right, sweetie?"

Jessie had fidgeted. "What about for another Kevin?"

" _Another_ baby? Jessica Evelyn Cody, don't you think we have enough dirty diapers in the house as it is?"

Jessie had giggled and run outside to play. Not until she was trying to fall asleep that night had she realized Mama hadn't really answered.

But it had been real clear that this squirmy poopy thing couldn't fend for itself, so fair play meant she had to look after it. When Mama was at work Jessie and Kevin went to Grammy, except Grammy was old and tired so Jessie mostly looked after him. Made sure he didn't get into any trouble. Made sure, as he learned to toddle awkwardly, that he stayed away from the outlets and the stove. He'd climbed into the blinds once, while Grammy snored in the rocking chair, and Jessie hadn't noticed the cord around his neck until— almost—

She'd screamed and dove for him, holding him up, and yelled for Grammy. Grammy had snorted awake, gotten her scissors, cut Kevin free, and then pulled them both onto her lap for cuddles and kisses until they calmed down. That was one thing Grammy was good for. She had a nice lap.

"You have a smart and quick and brave big sister," Grammy'd told Kevin, as he nodded solemnly. Then she'd turned to Jessie. "And you, you saved his life." She'd kissed Jessie's hair. Jessie had basked in the approval and her own heroism.

As Kevin got older, Jessie protected him from the bigger kids and from bad spiders and from scorpions and snakes. One night a little rattler got into their bedroom. Kevin was out of bed playing like usual, because he never seemed to sleep, and Jessie watched sleepily, wishing he would stop already. She didn't see the shadow moving until almost too late, when it was already between her and him. Between him and the door.

By the time Papa heard her screams and came running with the shotgun, she'd already beaten the thing half to death with her biggest shoe. Jessie had never seen Papa move so fast— had never heard him say those words, either— as when he grabbed her, threw her into the hallway, grabbed Kevin, yanked him clean over the snake and tossed him after Jessie, and slammed the door behind him, yelling for Mama to bring him the axe _quick_.

As Kevin grew, Jessie showed him the best spots along the creek, where he could leave a secret and have it still there when he came back for it, and the floppy place in the park fence where you could wriggle under without being seen. She helped him learn his letters and numbers: for some reason he didn't understand those so well, though she _knew_ he wasn't stupid. In the little time Mama had to sit with him and try to teach him, she always got that pinched look on her face.

Grammy was dead by then, so when Mama cleaned houses Jessie and Kevin would walk to the library, just about the only place with air conditioning, and she'd take a book off the shelf and they'd sit and she'd go over it with him again and again until he started to get it. It was almost like he saw things backwards. Or scrambled, maybe. But he _had_ to get it, so she made him work until he did. When he started school the next year, his grades were nothing great but they weren't awful either.

Or they'd go to the park, and Jessie would play soccer with a few of her friends while Kevin played baseball with the boys. That was the summer the pastor set up a team to play in the local league, and picked Kevin. Papa and Mama came to the games that they could. Papa was so proud of Kevin, always talked about how _his_ son was out there with the bigger boys, he wasn't a little wuss, he wasn't afraid of anything...

And then one game, Kevin got hit in the face and he started bleeding and bleeding and it didn't stop.

Since then... doctors and time in the hospitals. Less to eat. More crying from Mama, drinking from Papa, screaming between both of them.

And now her baby brother was dying. No one had told her. They didn't have to.

"Oh." The lady's expression turned serious. "I'm sorry to hear that."

Jessie scuffed her feet on the pavement and nodded. Was this another lady from the church? At least she wasn't going on and on about how it was all part of God's plan. The last lady who'd come by with food had talked and talked like that, not seeing or not caring how Papa's face darkened and Mama's face got pinched.

That night Papa and Mama had fought. "There is _NOTHING_ up there, Marian!" Papa had yelled, so drunk he was slurring, while Mama had wept. " _NOTHING_ , do you hear me? Nothing that's gonna save your precious son! And I won't have these fucking sanctimonious two-faced hypocrites coming into my house and telling us—"

Jessie had huddled under the covers and figured he was probably right, because no matter what she prayed, Mama and Papa kept yelling.

Except then they did stop and it was even worse, Papa's violent sobs drowning out everything else.

Next day Papa stopped her in the kitchen. "I'm sorry you had to hear that last night, Jessica."

Jessie had looked at him, waiting for something else, some comfort, some spark of _anything_ , but... no.

Now, the lady considered her. On second thought, she didn't seem like a church lady. "What would you do if you could make him better?"

Jessie looked up at her, this strange lady who asked strange questions. Questions with clear answers. "I'd do anything."

The lady nodded. "Your parents home?"

Jessie jerked her head at the screen door. In better times, Mama or Papa would already've come out here to see who was talking to their daughter, but now... Papa was probably a little drunk and Mama was probably lying down on the bed. "Go on in."

#

The quiet beeping of machines. Wheels on linoleum at all hours. The pervasive smells of industrial laundry and antiseptic.

It took her two or three trips through that fevered loop of sticky dreams before she realized those weren't part of it.

Neither was the breathtaking pain in her hip.

#

The strange lady talked and talked with Mama and Papa, and Jessie couldn't hear what they were saying. She stayed outside as the sun went down and the vicious mosquitoes came out. If Kevin were here she would've made them both go inside before he could get eaten up, but Kevin was in the hospital.

One of the doctors had mentioned bringing him home to die.

No one called Jessie in to eat, and she didn't think the lady's bag would've held supper anyway. Jessie'd sneak in later and see if there was anything in the fridge, except she was pretty sure she knew _everything_ in the fridge and it wasn't much.

She'd drink a lot of water before bed. It would be okay.

"Sweetpea?"

Jessie perked up. Papa hadn't called her that in a long time. He hadn't called her _anything_ in that warm, soft tone in a long time.

She padded inside. Mama and Papa were sitting close to each other on the couch. The strange lady sat upright on the uncomfortable armchair.

"Honey, you talked with Dr. Preston outside, didn't you?" Mama asked.

_Doctor?_ Jessie's heart raced. She looked at the strange lady and nodded. Dr. Preston's smile was a little cool, but Jessie liked it. It was calm and honest.

"She's from a charity that helps families of— of sick kids." Mama's voice trembled before she regained control. Papa took her hand. "She says she found us through the hospital and there may— there may be something they can do for Kevin."

Jessie looked at the lady, feeling a wild bound of hope, except she'd learned already that you couldn't trust hope.

"I don't want you to get your hopes up too much," Dr. Preston cautioned, with another cool, somehow comforting smile. "But in trials on other kids it's worked very well."

"And while Kevin's being treated," Mama continued—

Her voice shook in a strange way. She looked sideways at Papa, then at the lady. Dr. Preston nodded.

"While Kevin's being treated, Dr. Preston's charity wants to take you to San Francisco for... a few weeks. To give you a break from all this." Mama looked sideways again. "And to see if you might... like to go to boarding school next year."

Jessie shook her head. "What's boarding school?"

"It's a school where you live there," Dr. Preston explained.

_Live_ at _school?_ That sounded _awful_.

"So everything's in one place and you have time for things like... putting on plays, swimming, horseback riding..."

Jessie's ears perked up.

"Anyway, we can talk about all that later. The important thing is, we'd like to have you in San Francisco for a few weeks."

"But I want to stay here and help look after Kevin."

"You can't."

Dr. Preston said it in such a calm, friendly tone that Jessie thought she'd misheard. She looked at her hard. The lady smiled at her.

Jessie looked at her parents to see if they'd heard. She didn't understand. But Mama and Papa didn't look concerned.

So... so if Jessie made a fuss, what was going to happen?

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "Okay."

#

If her own people had her, they would have said something by now. So she was definitely under guard.

Emma would not be pleased.

Assuming she was alive.

But Jessica had a hazy memory of one of the soldiers carrying Emma away... as she herself lay there, left behind.

Emma wouldn't be pleased, but _she'd_ insisted on bringing Jessica, eight months along—

That hit her like a whip, and snapped her into alertness. _The baby_.

Was...?

She couldn't feel it kicking. But she couldn't feel much of anything.

 

#

Jessie had never been to California, never been on an airplane, never been farther from home than Grandma and Grandpa's house two hours away.

Mama sent her off with two changes of clothes, her stuff from the bathroom, five dollars' emergency money— Jessie knew that was a lot— and instructions to call when she could.

She held Jessie tightly, and— and she was crying. That made Jessie feel weird and scared and sick. Then Papa hugged her, and—

and _Papa_ was crying.

Jessie had only ever seen him cry twice, one at Grandma's funeral, once when Kevin was born.

"My little sweetpea," Papa whispered. "Be brave for your brother."

For Kevin. Yes. She could be brave for him. She could do anything for him.

The planes were big and strange and loud. Dr. Preston asked if she was afraid, and smiled approvingly when Jessie said no. That was the truth. Waiting for Kevin to die and watching her parents fight was scary. This was just weird.

She hugged her backpack tightly as they drove away from the airport in San Francisco. It was dry here just like back home, but with a lot more hills. From the airplane window she'd seen a huge stretch of water, so big she couldn't see the end. The ocean, Dr. Preston said.

How was Kevin doing, back home? Had they started the new medicine yet? How were Mama and Papa? Had they stopped crying?

They stopped in front of a house like the ones Mama cleaned. "Here we are," Dr. Preston told her with a smile.

Jessie got out cautiously. "Where are we?"

"This is where I live."

"... I thought we were going to your charity."

"We will, but you've had a long trip. This is the first time you've left Texas, isn't it?"

Jessie nodded.

"I thought you might like to rest first and... get used to being in a new city." Dr. Preston smiled down at her.

"Can I call my parents?"

"I told them you'd call in a few days. I think they planned to spend the day at the hospital."

So Jessie followed her up the sidewalk of this strange big house. Inside, it was bright and fancy, but in a comfortable way. Nothing was stained. None of the furniture looked like you had to be careful where you sat on it so a spring didn't poke you in the butt. There were books _everywhere_ , some of them even new.

Jessie looked around with big eyes. It was bright and fancy and she missed her dark little house where everything was worn and she'd had to share a room with Kevin until he got sick. She missed _home_.

"Are you hungry?" Dr. Preston asked. "How about some lunch? Would you like that?"

"Yes please." Jessie remembered her manners. "Ma'am."

Dr. Preston smiled down at her and led her into the kitchen. "You don't have to call me ma'am. You can even call me Carol if you want."

You didn't call adults by their first names when you were a kid. You just _didn't_. Mama would be horrified.

Dr. Preston made her a big pile of grilled cheese sandwiches, and a plate of fruit turned into a smiling face. Mama had been too tired and worried to cook much for a long time. It tasted really good and Jessie could eat as much as she wanted. "Thank you," she said politely when she was done.

"You're welcome. Now, why don't I show you where you can take a nap? You must be tired."

Jessie followed Dr. Preston up a wide staircase, with fancy photos of people on the wall, to a sunny little room with a window that stuck out. It was a tidy room for grownups, but there was a stack of chapter books on the table by the bed, and some toys in the closet.

"Does someone else live with you?" Jessie asked.

"Yes, I have a little girl who's a few years older than you are," Dr. Preston said. "She just left for summer camp in the mountains. She'll be gone for two weeks."

"Oh."

Dr. Preston showed Jessie where to hang her things in the closet, told her to rest, and shut the door. Jessie took her shoes off and climbed into bed. It smelled really good. But she wasn't tired. It had been just such a weird day...

The house was big and nice and felt like no one who lived there knew what it was like not to have enough. But when it got dark, Jessie really started to miss her own little room. Her own parents. Dr. Preston left her alone until dinner, and then cooked spaghetti and meatballs.

"Do you know what my _favorite_ part of my job is?" Dr. Preston asked her over ice cream for dessert.

Jessie politely swallowed first. "Making sick people better?"

"No, dear, I'm not that kind of doctor."

She _wasn't?_ Then what—

"Sometimes I get the give the world just a little nudge in the right direction," Dr. Preston said. "Sometimes things don't go like they're supposed to, do they?"

Of course not. Her little brother wasn't _supposed_ to be sick. He was supposed to be healthy and grow up big and strong and live to a hundred and five.

She shook her head.

"Well, sometimes I get to fix that." She smiled at Jessie. "It's kind of like being Santa."

"Thank you for helping my brother," Jessie said, because she thought Dr. Preston had said all those things so Jessie would thank her.

"Of course, dear. And I hope we can help _you_ , too."

"I'm not sick."

"No, but you are stuck in a dead-end west Texas town with no future and no prospects of getting out."

Jessie stared at her.

"We'll talk about that later," Dr. Preston added.

Jessie wasn't sick, but she was, she realized that night, desperately, desperately _homesick_.

It was comfortable here, but it was so strange. Strange-new and strange- _weird_. The loneliness settled into Jessie's heart as a deep ache, and she muffled her sniffles against the pillow.

Papa had told her to be brave for Kevin. Maybe if Dr. Preston wasn't pleased with Jessie, she'd change her mind about helping Kevin. So Jessie would be as good and polite as she possibly could, and maybe things would be less weird tomorrow.

And it was only for a few weeks, right?

#

She managed to stay awake long enough to listen and be sure the room was empty. There would be a guard somewhere. But probably outside.

She opened her eyes to slits. Her belly loomed in front of her. So—

She closed her eyes.

She felt the baby moving sluggishly.

She'd been shot. Memories down by the creek were hazy, but—

Wyatt. Wyatt had been there.

Of course Wyatt had been there: she'd been holding him at gunpoint.

That memory ached more than Rittenhouse would have allowed. Hadn't even been her first time. Not after 1888.

It hurt and she couldn't stay awake...

 

#

_Be brave for your brother_ went through Jessie's head a lot in the next days. If not for knowing that these people were helping Kevin, she would've found a way to call and beg Mama and Papa to bring her home.

But they didn't have the money for a plane ticket, anyway.

Dr. Preston let her call home a few days after that, and dialed for her. But the phone rang and rang and nobody picked up. Finally Jessie had to hang up.

"They're probably just at the hospital," Dr. Preston told her. "You can try again later."

But what if— what if something had happened? What if—

She'd said goodbye to Kevin from the other side of the inside window, waving at him and blowing him kisses. He'd waved back weakly, lying all pale and bald and skinny against the pillows.

What if she never _saw_ him again?

His best chance, his _only_ chance, was this new medicine Dr. Preston had mentioned. So Jessie had to do whatever she could to make sure he got it.

She wasn't sure what to do in that big house by herself. She wasn't sure what Dr. Preston did, either, but she worked in a big sunny office downstairs full of more books and papers. Jessie was pretty sure the house had almost as many books as their whole public library, but they were... really different. Big thick history books about stuff Jessie'd never heard of in school.

Dr. Preston seemed to be waiting for something, but Jessie didn't know what. To pass the time, Jessie mostly read the chapter books she'd found in the bedroom. Sometimes she played in the backyard, but it was boring by herself. But whatever Dr. Preston fixed for breakfast or lunch or dinner, she could eat as much as she wanted.

"What about your charity?" she asked politely, at dinner, after another day that was exactly the same as the day before.

"Oh, I heard from them this morning. They had a leak overnight and the whole office flooded. So unfortunate. You'll have to stay here a few more days. You don't mind, do you?"

"No, ma'am."

"I know it's not very exciting," Dr. Preston said apologetically, "but we'll find something for you to do very soon."

Dr. Preston took her horseback riding— _horseback riding!_ — the next day. All Jessie had were shorts, so Dr. Preston brought her a pair of jeans that were a little long on her. Jessie wondered if these belonged to the girl whose pictures were on the stairs, starting from a little wrinkly baby at the bottom to a girl Jessie's age with big dark eyes and curly dark hair at the top.

They drove outside the city to a stable. Jessie needed help getting up onto the sweet brown horse with spots, but then she got to ride it _all by herself_.

"You liked that, huh?" Dr. Preston asked her with a smile on their way back.

Jessie realized how much she'd been talking, so she just nodded.

"What else do you like?"

"I like soccer," she offered.

"Oh, do you?"

Jessie nodded again. "And I'm good at it." She looked at Dr. Preston. That was one of the things Mama said she shouldn't say, because it sounded stuck-up. But it _wasn't_ stuck-up, it was _true_.

"Does, um," she added. "Does your daughter play soccer?"

"Sadly, my little girl is a bit of a klutz," Dr. Preston said. "I always have to watch her, or I take my eye off her for two seconds and she's gotten into some kind of trouble. But." She smiled, like she was thinking about something far off. "I love her to pieces anyway."

"Oh." Jessie paused. "I like going to the library with Mama," she offered. "And I like cooking with her. I like going for walks with Papa. I like playing with my brother. Well..." She fidgeted with her seat belt. "I used to."

"What about school?" Dr. Preston asked. "Tell me what you like there."

"I like math. My teacher didn't think I would 'cause he said mostly girls aren't good at math—"

Dr. Preston gasped. "He _did?_ "

Jessie nodded.

"And what did your parents say?"

"Oh." Jessie looked down and scuffed her foot against the car mat before remembering this wasn't Mama and Papa's car and that was maybe rude. "I didn't tell them. _But_ , I _do_ like it and I'm good at that too."

"What about history? Do you like history?"

Jessie thought of all the history books in Dr. Preston's house. "Yeah, it's okay."

Dr. Preston gave her a funny sideways look. Oops.

"I liked it when I found a country with a real funny name in one of my teacher's books," Jessie added. "Czech-o-slo-va-ki-a."

"Jessica, Czechoslovakia's not a country any more."

"... oh." This felt like a test, and she wasn't doing too well.

"You've never left the country, I suppose," Dr. Preston said after a few minutes.

Jessie shook her head. "Mama said when I was older we could go across the border maybe."

Dr. Preston brought in the mail when they got back to her house. "Mail for you," she told Jessie with a smile. She slit open the envelope and held out a picture. Jessie grabbed it eagerly as Dr. Preston dropped the envelope in the trash.

It was Kevin, sitting up in his hospital bed, with Mama's arm around him. Papa was sitting on the other side of the bed. Mama was smiling tremulously, Kevin looked a little less like a skull, and Papa didn't have that hard, pinched look Jessie'd come to hate.

She turned it over. On the back, in Papa's handwriting: _Love you, sweetpea_.

She turned it over again and stared, hungry for every detail. It was a Polaroid like the one Papa's camera made, but he was in the picture, too, so someone else must've been there to take it. One of the nurses probably. And in the picture Mama had braided her hair all pretty like she used to, and Papa had shaved and combed his hair.

"It hasn't been easy for them, has it?" Dr. Preston asked behind her.

Jessie shook her head, still searching their faces eagerly for... for _something_.

"That's only to be expected, considering their disadvantages." Dr. Preston turned away, flipping through her own mail.

Jessie looked up fast. "What disadvantages?"

"Well, your mother barely graduated high school—"

Jessie didn't stop to think how Dr. Preston knew that, because _she_ knew the truth. "Yeah, 'cause her dad got real sick and died and she had to keep everything going in the house." Her words came out on a flood of pent-up feeling. "There's nothing wrong with being _loyal_."

"No, there isn't." Dr. Preston sounded very serious. "Loyalty is a _very_ important trait. I'm glad you find it valuable." She stared down at Jessica, and then her face relaxed. "But she cleans houses to make ends meet, Jessica. Wouldn't you like to do better for your own children?"

Jessie stared at her. It felt like disloyalty to nod.

But it was the truth.

#

The door opened. Jessica kept her eyes closed.

"Mrs. Logan?"

"I thought she was awake earlier." A quiet second voice, also unfamiliar. Someone checked her port. "Her next of kin's here, but if she's awake, then—"

_Wait,_ what? Her next of kin was still Wyatt, on paper, which meant— what?

She groaned softly.

"Hey, there," the second voice said gently. "You back with us?"

She let her eyelids flutter, then relaxed into stillness again.

"How are you feeling?"

She didn't have to fake this groan.

"Yeah, you've lost a lot of blood. You're better now than you were yesterday, that's for sure."

"Mrs. Logan," the first voice said after a pause, "I'm Dr. Sanchez. We need to do an emergency C-section. Otherwise, you might lose your baby."

_What?!_

"Neither of you are in great shape after your shooting. _You're_ going to be all right, but this is the best chance we have to save her."

She felt a mix of fear and longing so strong it felt like it would split her apart. Emma— wouldn't be happy, to have the baby out of Jessica where it could be used against them. But— if not— Jessica _couldn't_ lose it—

_Her_ . And it was a _her_. Jessica hadn't known anything about the baby, because she'd been stuck in the 1930s for months.

A daughter. She was going to have a daughter.

"Do we have your permission, Mrs. Logan?"

She was childishly afraid. Rittenhouse had taught her better, years ago. But the chance of saving her baby—

Pragmatism was her job; everything in service of the cause, in the end. Family, children, everything. But pain and drugs had lowered her guard. She couldn't deny how badly she wanted this kid to live, and not just as another asset to be trained.

"Yes," she whispered.

#

The next week Dr. Preston brought her to her charity's office to stay.

All the offices Jessie had ever seen were tiny dusty back rooms, or cramped doctor's offices. She stared as this building with high ceilings, big open spaces, and fancy furniture. It was even more impressive than Dr. Preston's house.

And it felt even less like home, she realized, when she saw where she was going to stay.

The room was bigger than the one she shared with Kevin. It had a bed and a desk and an uncomfortable-looking chair, and a bathroom fancier than she'd ever seen behind a door. And that was it.

Jessie put her backpack down on the bed. The little battered pink bag looked so out of place she wanted to cry.

Dr. Preston looked around. She didn't look too impressed, though Jessie couldn't understand why. "I've arranged for some books for you," she said. "To help pass the time. They should be here soon. In the mean time, why don't we go to the beach?"

Jessie wasn't sure she'd heard right. "To the _beach?_ "

"Why not?" Dr. Preston smiled at her. "You've never been to a beach before, have you?"

" _No_."

"Well, I brought a bathing suit for you." Dr. Preston handed her a plastic bag. "Change in the bathroom."

At the beach, Jessie couldn't believe— the water was even bigger up close, and it just stretched out to the end of the sky _forever_. If she went out there and kept going and going and going, where would she end up?

She squinted in the brightness. "What's out there?" She pointed.

Dr. Preston stared out. "Oh, Japan," she said, "and South Korea— Seoul— and then China and Mongolia..." She looked down at Jessie. "This job involves a lot of travel sometimes, you know," she said. "I've gotten to see some of those places."

That sounded amazing.

Dr. Preston sat in a chair under an umbrella while Jessie played in the waves. She'd never dreamed water could push and pull so hard, but they knocked her off her feet into the sand, and she came up spluttering and squealing over and over.

She went farther out and glanced over her shoulder. Dr. Preston smiled indulgently, then went back to her book. The waves were up to Jessie's shoulders now, and it was so _cold_ and it felt so _good_. A white wave top smacked her roughly in the face— she fell back— she went under—

She breathed in a bunch of water and clawed her way to the surface, choking. She nearly threw up before she got all the water out. When the next wave came she jumped so it didn't hit her face, and it hit her stomach instead, knocking her on her butt. But she scrambled up, the sand scraping her knees.

It was really rough.

But... but what was out just a bit farther? Was it the same? Or was there something else, something _different?_

She looked over her shoulder again. Dr. Preston looked up, then went back to reading.

Jessie held her breath and ran through the next wave. Just beyond—

The bottom dropped off.

She wobbled and tried to scramble backwards. The next wave shoved her off her feet and sucked her under. Her scream got her a mouthful of water. She choked frantically. Everything was green and murky and she heard a loud roaring. Panicked, she kicked wildly, flailing her arms. She felt the air on her hand— she jumped in that direction—

Another wave knocked her backwards and pulled her back under. She _couldn't breathe_ and she _needed_ to breathe— her body tried to breathe in— she couldn't let it— she felt sand in her face— which way was up?— she struck out wildly—

Something grabbed her and hauled her relentlessly backwards. Her head broke the surface. She gasped, choked, barfed up water, gagged, coughed, and fought for breath. The back of her nose and throat burned, and she was crying from the salt in her eyes. Finally she calmed down and looked around.

"It's foolish to play in the breakers, Jessica," Dr. Preston said, still hanging on to her by the back of her suit. "You can stay in the shallows, or you have to push past the waves to go out deep. But you can't wait in between and not make up your mind."

Jessie nodded. "Thank you," she gasped.

"I can see we're going to have to teach you to swim." Dr. Preston looked down at her sternly, but softened with a smile. "I think you've had enough. Why don't you come dry off."

She carried Jessie through the worst of the waves until Jessie could scamper through what was left onto shore. She sat on a big pink towel in the sun and let the water run off her until she didn't want to shiver any more.

When they got back to the charity's office and Jessie's new room, a big stack of big books waited on the desk. Jessie looked at them with wide eyes. Dr. Preston had her look through them as she combed out Jessie's hair. She knew what she was doing, and how not to pull. Mama was even better than she was at it, but Papa wasn't as good.

"I'll be busy the next few days," Dr. Preston told her. "I'll try to come by and see you, but in the mean time, you can keep yourself occupied with these."

"Yes ma'am."

Dr. Preston left. Jessie washed off in the shower and put on clean clothes. She'd forgotten to ask what she would eat, but at exactly six o'clock, someone knocked on the door.

Jessie fumbled with the big heavy door and finally got it open. "Hello?" she said cautiously.

A big man in a dark suit was standing there with a tray of food.

"Oh. Thank you."

She took it from him. He walked away without a word. Jessie looked at it carefully. It was grilled cheese again, which she really liked, and tomato soup with letter noodles in it, which she kind of liked, and green beans, which she didn't like at all but would eat to be polite.

He came back for the tray exactly half an hour later and still didn't say anything. Jessie read until it got dark, dutifully trying to pay attention to the big words and the stuff she didn't understand at _all_. She turned the lights on and got into her pajamas.

At home Mama always made her go to bed before she was ready. Here she could stay up as long as she wanted, because there was no one to make her go to sleep. But there was nothing to _do_. All she had was these books.

The hallway outside was quiet. She tried the door—

It was locked.

Oh.

She swallowed, climbed back into the chair, and very carefully read for an hour. Was she the only one here in this big building?

Finally she slipped the Polaroid of Mama and Kevin and Papa under her pillow, turned out the lights, and went to sleep.

#

Jessica struggled towards consciousness.

Oh God. It hurt so badly. Maybe she didn't _want_ to wake up.

A jumble of voices. She found herself straining for Wyatt's, but couldn't pick it out.

"... tell the husband... come back?"

Pause. "... baby."

_Baby._ She could _feel_ she wasn't pregnant any more. _What_ happened _to my child?_ But she couldn't open her mouth, couldn't even open her eyes.

"... husband..."

She thought immediately of the Wyatt before she'd fled the bunker, the one who'd been suddenly so different from the man she'd been married to. But that was gone for good now. She'd shown him where her loyalty was.

And she knew what her loyalty demanded now. She had to get out of here.

#

Jessie read every day. Dr. Preston would visit and ask her about the books, and she did her best to answer. She was _so_ bored, and she wanted so badly to go home. She wanted to hear Mama singing again as she worked in the kitchen, hear Papa whistling as he worked on the car that was always breaking down. She wanted to climb into Papa's lap as he watched the evening news, though he said she was too big for that now. She wanted to visit Kevin every day and make him laugh as much as she could.

"I was just wondering if you'd heard from my parents?" she asked one day, as politely as she could. She hadn't talked to them once since she'd gotten here. There was a phone in the room but when she picked it up there was no dial tone.

"Yes, everything's going very well. Kevin's responding to the treatment and the doctors are _very_ optimistic." Dr. Preston smiled broadly at Jessie. "They said to tell you what a brave girl you are and to be brave a little while longer for your brother."

Jessie nodded and tried to feel brave. But she _didn't_ feel brave. She felt lost and lonely and homesick and a long way from where she was supposed to be.

"It's a big help to them to have you out of the way so they can focus on your brother," Dr. Preston added.

_Have me out of the way_ . Had Jessie been _in_ the way?

That was just the words Dr. Preston had used. She didn't mean it like that.

Jessie started thinking hard how to say she wanted to go home without being rude. She had a lot of time to think. She didn't spend _all_ her time in that room. Sometimes Dr. Preston came and took her for a walk or to the park or out to get hamburgers. Sometimes one of the big men in dark suits would take her through the building to another building that had a little swimming pool, and teach her to swim. His method of teaching her to swim was to tell her to jump in the deep end, let her flail around for a minute or two, and then tell her how to move her arms and legs together so she didn't go under.

But she spent a lot of time in that room, and she didn't have anything to do _but_ think.

Finally, the next week, she got up her courage and said, "You've been real gracious to have me here for so long and thank you and I probably shouldn't impose any longer 'cause, um, 'cause that would be rude." Mama would've been proud of that speech.

But Dr. Preston looked down at her with a serious expression. "Jessica, your brother's improving but he's still very sick, and your parents want you to stay a few more weeks. They called earlier. We arranged everything."

Jessie got a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. "I want to talk to them."

"Of course. Let's call them right now."

Dr. Preston walked her down long hallways until they came to an office. A man she hadn't met before was sitting behind a big desk. "You must be Jessica Cody." He smiled down at her.

Jessie nodded.

"We were hoping she could use your phone," Dr. Preston explained.

"Of course." The man pointed to the chair in front of the desk, and swung the phone around so Jessie could reach it. "Now, do you know your phone number?"

"Yes—"

"But you probably don't know your area code, do you? Let's just look that up." He opened a drawer and took out a folder, then took out the top sheet. "Here we are."

Jessie looked. It had her name, Mama and Papa and Kevin's names, their birthdays, their address, the phone number and area code, where they'd all been born, medical stuff Jessie didn't understand, Mama and Papa's old jobs...

What was on the _other_ sheets?

"Thank you," she said politely, and dialed. The man smiled benevolently at her.

Mama picked up on the third ring. "Hello?"

"Mama!" For just a second, everything felt all right.

"Jessie! Are you all right?" Mama was almost crying. "Darling, I miss you so much."

"I'm fine."

"And so— you want to stay longer, is that it?" Mama sounded very hesitant.

Jessie looked up at Dr. Preston. _You said_ she _said—_

But she didn't know how to say _no, please, take me home!_ in this office with Dr. Preston right there and the man still smiling at her.

"... yes?" she said cautiously. Did Mama really want her to stay away? "If that's what you want me to do?"

Mama's voice was familiar and loved and missed, but she sounded so far away. And _small_.

Mama cleared her throat. "Mind you're not imposing on these people."

"No ma'am."

"They're being very kind to you." Mama sniffled.

Jessie wanted to dig her toe into the carpet and scuff her feet, but she didn't know how much the grownups could hear. So she didn't say anything.

"Is Papa there?" she asked instead. "How's Kevin doing?"

"He— no, he's at the hospital with Kevin. Kevin's doing well, Jessie. He's doing so well."

Jessie wanted to sniffle too.

"Honey, this is probably a very expensive phone call for them," Mama added. "I don't want to keep you on the line too long."

"Tell Papa and Kevin hello and I love them and I love you too." Jessie was afraid big fat tears were going to start rolling down her cheeks. _Please, bring me_ home _, I want to go_ home.

"I will. Darling, I love you so much. You mind your manners, all right, Jessica Evelyn?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Good girl." And Mama hung up.

 

 

#

Slowly, she got her head together. She needed to get intel. And then she needed to get out.

_Without the baby?_

That thought was more wrenching than she'd expected. She'd just been pregnant, her body hadn't gone through the usual birth process— her hormones were running haywire. Her breasts ached horribly.

_We'll see, okay?_ She couldn't do anything for her little one if she couldn't even get out of here herself.

She _definitely_ couldn't walk yet. Baby— _ha_ — steps.

She listened carefully to try to figure out where the guard was and how many there were. She lay perfectly still so she could listen carefully...

#

Jessie got more and more scared as the days went by. She didn't know how long she'd been in San Francisco, but it seemed like a really long time. Dr. Preston had said _a few weeks_. She'd said _see if you might like to go to boarding school next year_ too, but Jessie hadn't heard anything else about that. And, anyway, she already knew. She _didn't_ want to go to boarding school. She _wanted to go home._

Back home she'd be playing down by the creek with her friends, or playing soccer in the park in the evening when it wasn't so hot, or drinking lots and lots of iced tea to stay cool through the day. Definitely not reading anything except the chapter books she got from the library. She wished she had the chapter books from Dr. Preston's house. She hadn't finished all of them.

She'd run away once when she was six, when she'd found out Mama was having another baby. She'd stuffed a bunch of clothes and a sleeve of graham crackers in her backpack and she'd snuck out when Mama's back was turned. She'd walked all the way across town and then sat on a rock outside the fence around the old factory and ate some of the graham crackers. It had been hot and she'd been thirsty and she hadn't thought to bring any water. Her plan was to sleep in the park down in the little hollow under the overhanging bank, which was dry this time of year. But Mama and Papa would know to check the park so she had to wait until it was safe to go. Her feet hurt and it suddenly seemed like a very long way to the park. Or to anywhere.

Suddenly, their old car pulled in and squealed to a stop in the empty parking lot. Papa climbed out, looking angrier than Jessie had _ever_ seen him.

Jessie stared at her toes.

When Papa finally said something, it was worse than shouting. "Jessica Evelyn, your mother is worried _sick_. Get in the car right now. You're not going to be able to sit down for a week after this stunt."

Jessie got up, but she dragged her feet. "It doesn't matter," she muttered.

" _What?_ No ma'am. No back talk. That's an extra spank, just for that."

She stopped and looked up at him defiantly. "It doesn't matter if you spank me 'cause you're gonna replace me which is worse!"

Papa stared down at her. " _What?_ " he repeated, in a much different tone.

She looked back mutinously and felt her eyes fill with tears.

Papa opened the driver's seat and sat sideways with his legs sticking out. "Come here."

She knew better to ignore him, but she walked slowly.

"I'm not going to spank you, Jessie. C'mere." His voice was weird and soft like she'd never heard before. He picked her up and sat her on his lap, lifting her backpack off and putting it on the floorboards. "Who told you we were _replacing_ you?"

"Mama used to call me her baby but now she's having a new baby." Jessie stared at the seat belt.

Papa sighed. "Honey, remember when you came home from school last month and told me about words that mean two things?"

She nodded.

"Now, are you _a_ baby any more? Are you still in diapers and sucking on a pacifier?"

"No I'm six!"

"Right, you're my big girl now. But you're still your Mama's baby. And you're still my baby. You'll always be our first—" He choked, all of a sudden, and he sounded really funny. "Our first baby girl no matter how big you get."

Jessie looked up at him.

"Jessie, kids aren't like clothes, you can't just swap 'em with each other." He sounded frustrated. "The new baby won't be exactly like you. It might not be nothing like you. Honey, we couldn't replace you if we wanted to. And we don't."

"Oh." Jessie's voice felt really small. "Then why's Mama having another baby?"

"Well, she likes babies, honey. She likes having kids."

Jessie thought about this.

"Understand?"

Slowly, she nodded.

"Now, the next time you get some fool idea in your head like this, you come _talk_ to me about it instead of running away and scaring your mother half to death." His voice was stern. "Look at me, Jessie."

Jessie looked up.

"Promise?"

Jessie nodded again.

"Good." He lifted her into the other seat. "Now buckle up, we're going home."

_We're going home_.

She might've run away now, if it had just been her. She didn't know where she would go, but she'd find a way.

But it wasn't just her.

Dr. Preston came in one day to find her reading about Indians. Jessie hastily dried her tears.

"Sad, isn't it?" Dr. Preston nodded to the book.

Jessie nodded.

Dr. Preston shook her head. "Such a tragedy, to read through history and think how much _better_ things could've been if people had done what was best for them. If they'd had someone to tell them what was best for them. But instead everyone fights for what they think they need, what they think they deserve, and they just cause so much _pain._ Over and over and over." She shook her head again. "It's no different today, you know. There's lots to be fixed if you only know where to look."

Jessie nodded again politely.

Dr. Preston took her to the park, which was a fun break from that room. She sat with— what else?— a book and watched Jessie play. But it wasn't nearly as much fun as it would've been with her friends. Jessie had thought about asking if Dr. Preston's daughter might want to play sometime, but she hadn't yet for some reason.

"Jessica, there was a reason we wanted to help your brother," Dr. Preston said as they walked back.

Jessie looked at her.

"How would you like to learn to help people like we do? Make things better?"

Jessie thought about this.

"Make sure people make the right choices in their lives?" Dr. Preston added.

"Maybe," Jessie said cautiously. She hadn't really thought about what she wanted to be when she grew up. Maybe a teacher. Or a nurse like Grammy had been. When Kevin had first gotten sick Jessie had thought she might want to be a doctor, to fix sick kids, but the doctors hadn't been able to fix Kevin after all. Besides, you had to go to college to be a doctor, and Jessie didn't know anyone who'd done that.

Well, she did now. "What are you a doctor of?"

"Philosophy."

_Philosophy?_

"I'm a historian," Dr. Preston added.

A historian-philosopher? Jessie didn't understand. But now at least all the history books made sense.

"And I use history to help fix the world," Dr. Preston told her, smiling. "It does, sadly, need a lot of fixing."

"I think I might like that," Jessie said. She wasn't sure how exactly Dr. Preston was fixing the world with history, but she seemed to want to keep kids from dying of leukemia, and Jessie definitely wanted to do that.

Jessie kept careful track of the days. The first time Dr. Preston had said _a few weeks_ . The second time she'd said _a few more weeks_. At some point, not yet but Jessie wasn't sure how soon, school was gonna start again.

She started dreaming that maybe Mama and Papa would wonder why she was staying out here so long and come find her. But she knew they didn't have that kind of money. They'd borrowed so much for Kevin already, and anyway, Papa'd been barely holding on to his job with spending so much time in the hospital.

And even if they'd _had_ the money, Kevin needed them there. They couldn't just get up and go to California all of a sudden.

No, Jessie was on her own.

"Have you ever been in a fistfight?" Dr. Preston asked her one day.

"No ma'am." Mama said ladies didn't fight. And Jessie had blooded Travis Winthrop's nose at recess one day when he wouldn't stop picking on little Elise Parker and trying to take her glasses, but that wasn't the same thing at all.

"Would you like to learn how?"

Jessie stared at her.

"There are some not-so-nice people in this world, Jessica," Dr. Preston told her seriously. "It's important that you're able to protect yourself."

"Maybe some other day," Jessie told her. She wasn't so much concerned about being rude now, because she knew Kevin was already getting the treatment, _had_ already gotten the treatment, and if Dr. Preston got sick of her and sent her home, that was where she _wanted_ to go. Besides. She didn't think Mama wanted her coming home as a slugger.

"There was a bad fight on the first day of school last year, though," she added, seeing an opening. "Mikey Peterson and Jeff Hughes got into it 'cause Mikey said Jeff's sister was real ugly."

"Mmm."

Jessie hesitated. "I think school'll be starting again soon right?"

Dr. Preston didn't say anything.

"So it's probably getting time for me to go home. Again I'm real grateful for being out here this summer—"

"I heard from your parents again," Dr. Preston said. "They're not ready to have you back yet."

Jessie stared at her again. She knew, this time, deep down, that that was a lie. Mama and Papa would _never_ put it like that.

And so was any of the rest of it true?

"Am I ever going home?" she whispered.

"Jessica, dear." Dr. Preston smiled down at her gently. "You _are_ home."

#

Being unable to walk was a problem. She needed to threaten or trick someone into moving her. To threaten someone she needed some kind of weapon, and besides, it was pathetically easy to escape from a woman who was on a gurney and dependent on _you_ for transportation. Because, if she shot you, then she was... stuck.

That left trickery. Her brain felt like glue, but it was time to think her way out of this with that brain Rittenhouse had used to praise so much.

The door opened. Light footsteps, too slow for a nurse or doctor. One pair, which meant no one was there to talk _about_ her.

She had a visitor.

#

It took her two weeks to run away.

She had to figure out how. This time she had to run farther and faster than before, but she wasn't six, she was nine. She had three more whole years of life behind her. And San Francisco was a _huge_ city. Many more places to hide than her little town.

She got real attached to one of Dr. Preston's books and started carrying it with her everywhere: to the pool, to the park, in the car. Dr. Preston just smiled indulgently. So when Dr. Preston told her they were going to the park again, she didn't ask why Jessie was bringing her backpack, not when it had that big book sticking out the top. Jessie hadn't dared pack her clothes, that would've been too obvious, but she had an extra pair of the undies Dr. Preston had bought her, and a light jacket she'd brought her, too. That one had a tiny stain near the hem and was probably a hand-me-down from the daughter Jessie had never met. On top of the clothes Jessie had two rolls and a brownie saved from supper. And this time she'd remembered water. Dr. Preston had bought her a water bottle when they were out last week and Jessie had smuggled it back to her room and filled it at the tap.

Jessie played for a while as Dr. Preston sat on the bench reading. Then she headed for the little bathroom, heart pounding.

"Jessica!" Dr. Preston called, and stood up to come with her. She always said it wasn't safe.

"It's okay!" Jessie said. "I just wanna wash my hands, I got 'em all muddy!" She showed her dirty hands as proof.

"Be careful," Dr. Preston said sternly, and sat down again.

Jessie nodded, hurried inside, and rinsed her hands quickly. Then she peered through the little slats at the bottom of the door until Dr. Preston went back to her book.

She waited, heart pounding. Then she pushed the door open just a tiny bit, not so that it made that loud creak, just enough for her to slip through. She darted away from the door, waiting for a shout...

She reached the end of the building and ducked around the side. Then she ran as fast as she could, keeping the building between her and Dr. Preston. She scrambled through the trees and up the ridge. On the other side was a busy street and at the top and bottom of the park were more busy streets. Dr. Preston wouldn't know which way she'd gone.

She plunged down the hill and darted across the street through traffic. Horns screeched and tires skidded. She reached the other side and darted around the legs of a big man, then ran down the sidewalk. If Dr. Preston got to the top of the hill she could still see Jessie from here so Jessie needed to get out of sight.

Jessie turned down the first street she came to. People stared at her as she ran but she couldn't slow down.

Which way was home? There was a map in the front of the big book in her backpack, but she didn't have to take it out. She'd memorized it. Texas was southeast. And Papa'd taught her how to tell directions from the sun. Of course she couldn't walk the _whole_ way, there were mountains and deserts, but if she had to pick a direction she might as well pick the right one, right? She turned southeast.

She lost track of time. Her feet were starting to hurt. A bus pulled up inches from her and a man nearly knocked her down climbing out of the side door. He swore at her as she dodged him.

A _bus_. She ducked between the closing doors into the bus's stairwell.

The bus was crowded enough that no one really paid attention. She stayed where she was so the driver couldn't see her over the seats and held on tight to the rail as they bumped along the street. They weren't going very fast, but still faster than she could walk, and this way she could kind of lean against the side and rest her feet.

After a while people started to get off. The next time they stopped and the doors opened again, Jessie jumped off.

She looked around. She was standing right next to a big parking lot. There was a grocery store with lights on and one window boarded, and a liquor store, like the one at home Mama told Jessie to stay away from. All the other stores in the building were boarded up.

Behind the building was a big hill. Maybe there'd be somewhere to hide back there.

But she found something better. One of the stores had a window in back that didn't have any glass and was only half boarded up. Jessie looked around the dirty little strip of pavement, didn't see anyone watching, and clambered up the back and over.

She discovered it had broken glass on the bottom. She hung on until she could wiggle backwards away from the glass, and dropped to the floor. The weight of the book nearly pulled her down.

She looked around. It didn't smell too good but no one could see inside unless they did like she did and climbed to the top of—

"Out," someone rasped.

Jessie jumped. She looked around. A pile of blankets on the other side of the room _moved_. Jessie gasped and thought of monsters—

A man— woman?— sat up, shedding blankets. "What'r'ya doin' here?" she slurred.

"Hiding from bad people," Jessie said.

The woman squinted. "C'mere."

Jessie looked at her.

"Get over here, brat. I don' eat kids and you just fell inta my living room."

Jessie crept closer. The woman, or the blankets, was where the bad smell was coming from. Jessie tried not to wrinkle her nose. Once she got closer she smelled booze too.

"What bad people?" the woman demanded.

"They took me from home and won't let me go back. I have to get to Texas."

" _Texas?_ " The woman stared at her, then shook her head. "Kid..."

She fell back into her blankets again.

Jessie sat against the other wall, as far away as she could get, and put on her jacket and opened the book.

"You c'n stay," the woman croaked. "But I ain't lookin' after you."

"Okay thank you," Jessie said politely.

She got hungry. And thirsty. She drank her water. She took out her rolls. She looked at the woman. Her hair was long and tangled and her face was really thin, not a skull like Kevin's had been but close.

Jessie crept across the room and put one of the rolls near her head, then darted back again.

The woman growled, felt around, felt the roll, and ate it in two bites. After a while she let out a gusty sigh and tossed one of her blankets into the middle of the room. "There."

Jessie went to retrieve it and nearly gagged from the smell. _Ew_.

That wasn't the only thing that stunk. She drank all her water, heard a tap dripping, and went to look. In what had once been a bathroom was a white sink dripping into a dirty plastic container full of water. Jessie tried to turn the water on but it didn't work. It was just the drip, then. And where the toilet had been was a bucket full of newspapers and... oh, _gross_.

It started to get dark. Jessie took the water to the woman when she asked for it, and set her empty water bottle in its place to fill. She held her breath and used the bucket, then curled up on the far side of the room. The concrete was cold. She gave in and spread the stinky blanket out under her. But then it smelled so bad she couldn't sleep.

She had to get out of here. Five dollars wouldn't get her all the way home. But how far _would_ it get her? Someplace where Dr. Preston couldn't find her?

She needed to find out tomorrow.

She shivered on the thin blanket on the cold concrete. She'd never ever slept on the floor before. This had to be a bad dream, right? She had to wake up soon. She wasn't _really_ here on the ground in an abandoned store, where she could hear— she shuddered— rats— with Mama and Papa having no idea where she was and her with no way to tell them. She'd wake up and she'd be in her own bed and Kevin would be sleeping in the other bed, all healthy, this whole thing was just a terrible dream...

But when she got that far in her thoughts, she knew it wasn't true. Because she'd been hoping to wake up from this leukemia dream for a year, and look where that had gotten her.

Oh no. What if—

Was it even _safe_ to go home? Would Dr. Preston look for her there?

Finally, she got so tired she slept a little.

She woke up hungry and thirsty and tired and scared and lonely and miserable it hadn't been a dream after all. It was still dark. She got her overflowing water bottle out of the dirty sink and drank it fast and replaced it, but it would take a long time to fill again. She curled up on the smelly blanket and tried not to cry.

She was a big girl. She was way too big to cry for her mommy. But the most important reason not to cry was because she knew no one was coming.

The woman on the other side of the room snorted awake and struggled out of her blankets. "Still here, kid?" she rasped.

Jessie nodded.

"Oughta go back t' yer mommy, little girl."

"I'm trying."

"Really? Looks like yer sitting on yer ass on the floor to me." She shuffled into the little bathroom and closed the door behind her.

When she came out she lurched to the front door and yanked a big board away. "Close this behind me and lemme in when I come back." She left without waiting for a reply.

Jessie peeked through the door to see what the woman was doing. She was crisscrossing the parking lot by the liquor store, picking up cans and bottles from the ground and hefting them. Some she dropped, some she brought to her mouth and tilted her head back and then dropped. She did that for a long time before she staggered back to the door, empty bottle in hand.

"What's yer name, kid?" she croaked as she shoved the board back into place.

"Jessica. What's yours?" Jessie asked politely.

"My _name?_ " The woman tilted her head and squinted. "Guess it's Millie." She plopped down in her blankets.

Jessie knew Mama would've wanted her to say "it's nice to meet you" but... so she settled for trying to smile.

"Later mebbe 'll show you how to scavenge," Millie mumbled. "You die here and I'll have vultures or cops or both."

"I'm not dying here," Jessie said in a small voice. But Millie was snoring into her blankets.

Scavenging, Jessie discovered, meant finding food the grocery store had thrown out. Millie led her over to the dumpster and told her to climb in and check. "Yer a lot more limber than I am, kid."

Jessie gave her an incredulous look.

"What, you wanna starve?"

No. And Jessie was really, _really_ hungry. But it was dirty and she could hear _rats_ in the dumpster. She'd never thought about how _dirty_ running away would be.

But Dr. Preston wasn't going to let her go _home_.

She shoved down all her disgusted squeals and did it. The actual climbing wasn't hard, she climbed trees in the park all the time at home. Millie held the top open and Jessie peered in, trying not to... you know. Her eyes got used to the darkness.

There was something in a package. She reached in and grabbed two loaves of bread and a box of little cakes, like Mama had used to sometimes buy at home. Then she jumped hurriedly down from the dumpster and showed what she'd found to Millie. Millie cackled with delight.

The bread was stale, but Jessie was so hungry it tasted really good. Millie ate her share with gusto. Jessie worried. Now that she'd shown Millie she could get food, maybe Millie wouldn't want to tell her anything about how to get out of here.

"Do you know where the bus station is?" Jessie asked.

"Bus stop? Right out front, but you gotta have money. Do you?" Millie looked at Jessie sharply.

"No. The bus _station._ For faraway buses."

Millie snorted. "It's a ways, kid. You gotta walk probably all day or take two or three city buses."

"Which ones?"

"Do I look like I gotta bus map in my head?" She gobbled the rest of her food and then flopped back in her blankets.

When the sun came up, Jessie stared at the map in the book. She was _here_ . She wanted to be _there_. The map didn't really help. But it showed her that there was a way to get home from here. Otherwise, she felt so far away.

She decided to take a nap using her backpack as a pillow. It was warmer now, so she didn't need the blanket and she could sleep a little better. The floor was cold and hard but she told herself it wasn't much worse than going camping with Papa.

Millie snored loudly on and off the whole day. Jessie tried to count the drips in the bathroom and got all the way up to two thousand five hundred and fifteen before she lost track. When it got dark, but not _too_ dark, she snuck out the front door.

The grocery store was still open. Jessie waited until she saw someone come out. "Excuse me," she said to the woman.

The woman looked down and gave her a harassed look. "I'm not buying anything."

"Can you tell me how to get to the bus station?"

The woman looked longer, and frowned. She didn't say anything. Jessie was about to repeat it when the woman finally said, "You gotta take the #17 to the #3 to the #6, I think."

"Okay thank you."

"Where's your mom?"

"She's lying down in my aunt's house," Jessie said. "My aunt's in the hospital and we came to visit and now we need to pick up my uncle."

"Well, you sure shouldn't be wandering around here after dark. You go home now."

"Okay." Jessie started across the parking lot. Each time she looked the woman was still watching her. Finally she turned the corner and started down a new street. She hid for a while, then crept back and looked. The woman was gone. Jessie hurried back to the empty store.

Millie was snoring again, but she had eaten most of the cakes while Jessie was gone. Jessie ate the last package and then her brownie, slowly to make them last. Then she steeled herself and used the icky bucket again and carried the plastic water container to Millie and put her own water bottle under the tap. She tried to count the number of drops to fill it but got lost at a hundred and seventeen. When it was full she drank it all and put the bottle under the tap again and tried to sleep.

They raided the dumpster again that night and found more bread and some boxes of cereal and some soft apples. Jessie ate the bread, but the apples made her tummy hurt. She curled up and tried to sleep again. But then Millie woke her up to watch the door while she staggered around the parking lot, looking for anything left in the empty bottles and cans.

_Crash!_

Jessie startled awake and blinked at the brightness. Why—

She shrieked.

The front door was flat on the floor, and the man from the telephone was standing in the doorway.

He smiled pleasantly at her. "You're quite a resourceful little girl, aren't you, Jessica?"

Jessie grabbed her backpack and bolted for the back of the store. But he was there, suddenly, and grabbed her before she could get up the window.

She tried to yank free, but he was too strong. "Let me go! _Let me GO!_ "

Millie snorted awake. "Whozzat?" She squinted up into the light. "Hey! Whaddaya got the kid for?"

Telephone Man turned towards Millie, and Jessie tried to get loose, but even when he wasn't paying full attention she still couldn't break away.

"Leggo the kid." Millie swayed to her feet— she grabbed her empty bottle from last night—

Telephone Man reached into his jacket for a gun. Jessie shrieked again. It had something long on the end. He—

_He—_

"NO!"

The noise was like a soft _pop_ . Millie fell to her knees after the first shot. Jessie _screamed_ and fought and tried to grab Telephone Man's other hand but he held her away from him with a terrifyingly strong arm. After the second shot Millie dropped on her face. The third and the fourth just made her body twitch and Jessie screamed and screamed and lost count and

Telephone Man stopped shooting. Millie coughed once and then her body sagged against the floor and Jessie knew she was dead. Blood ran out from under her in terrible red fingers.

Telephone Man put the gun away and looked down at Jessie with a little smile. "Let's go, shall we?"

He dragged Jessie towards the door. She grabbed onto the doorway as they passed it and clung with both hands, kicking at Telephone Man's shins. " _Help!_ " she yelled. " _HELP ME!"_

Telephone Man yanked, and she popped out of the doorway, hands stinging. She launched herself at him and bit and kicked and clawed. "HE'S NOT MY FATHER!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. "HE'S! NOT! MY! FATHER!"

"There's no need to make a fuss, Jessica," Telephone Man said sternly, like a school principal. "I'm taking you back where you belong."

"HE'S A STRANGER AND HE'S TAKING ME!" Jessie screamed. An old man just leaving the grocery store looked up, startled. Jessie's heart leapt— but the man just went back inside.

Jessie sobbed and attacked Telephone Man again. He grabbed her with both hands, his fingers digging into her shoulders hard. She turned her head and sank his teeth into his wrist. He breathed in sharply and slapped her face.

Jessie gasped. Telephone Man took advantage of her shock to drag her again, towards a waiting car. He kept her at arms length and she couldn't reach him but she Jessie dug her heels in and made him _work_ for every step.

The grocery store door opened. A man in a uniform came out and looked around. The old man followed him and pointed urgently.

"HELP! Jessie screamed. " _HELP!_ "

The cop? no, he wasn't a cop, that wasn't a cop uniform— hurried over. "Sir—"

"It's all right, officer." Telephone Man smiled indulgently. "I know exactly how this looks. My daughter, here, is having a psychotic break. We were so hoping she was cured until now."

"NO! HE'S NOT MY FATHER!"

Telephone Man reached into his jacket and held out some paper. "Here's a letter from the psychiatrist who's treating her."

The guard glanced at it. "Oh, Dr. Sispych. Wasn't he on the news the other day? Governor's advisory board?" He handed the letter back.

"I believe so, yes."

"IT'S NOT TRUE HE'S NOT MY FATHER!" Jessie stopped for breath. "I'm from Texas! He's kidnapping—"

"Yes, yes," Telephone Man chuckled, "and yesterday you were from Vermont and the day before that—"

"I'M FROM TEXAS!"

Telephone Man hoisted her bodily. She struggled and wriggled but she couldn't reach the ground or him or get free. "I'M FROM TEXAS AND MY NAME IS JESSICA CODY AND MY PARENTS—"

"That's quite enough, Jessica," Telephone Man said loudly. "Get in the car now. Sorry to have disturbed you, officer," he said over his shoulder.

"I'm sorry for your little girl." The officer shook his head. "I hope you can get her some help."

" _I'M FROM TEXAS—"_

Telephone Man looked grave. "I hope so, too."

"— _AND MY NAME IS JESSICA CODY—"_ She stared at the old man pleadingly. He stepped forward—

Telephone Man forced her into the car with a big man in the other seat. She bit the Telephone Man. He slapped her again. He shut the door and darted into the driver's seat before she could throw herself out. He started the car and the engine drowned out her voice.

Jessica launched herself forward and clawed at Telephone Man's face from behind. The big man grabbed her by her jacket and yanked her backwards. They drove quickly away. The guard had already turned away but the old man stared after them, horrified. Jessie stared back until they turned a corner and—

She turned to the big man and raked her fingernails over his face. He shoved her away and took out a big roll of shiny tape with the other. He grabbed both her legs and wrapped her ankles together with the tape. Jessie tried to wriggle away and fell into the floorboards. She curled around his shins and bit him through his pants. He choked, reached down, and hauled her up. He tried to grab both her wrists. She hit him in the stomach as hard as she could. He gasped and bent forward.

The car swerved sharply and then stopped. Telephone Man got out and opened the back door. Jessie bolted, forgot her legs were taped, fell into the floorboards, clawed at the tape—

Telephone Man hauled her up by her collar. She dangled, trying to kick. The other man grabbed one wrist. Jessie yanked the other out of reach— she leaned forward and bit him again—

Telephone Man grabbed her other wrist and shoved it towards the first, catching both in a cruel strong grip. The other man wrapped her wrists with tape. Jessie screamed and bit at whatever she could— Telephone Man tore off another strip of tape and slapped it over her mouth, catching her hair. Then he tossed her into the floorboards again and shut the door.

Jessie tried to yank the tape off her mouth but the other man yanked her head up and put his foot on her back to keep the rest of her down. Jessie panted and whimpered and grunted and tried to get his foot off her but he was too strong, he was too strong, she couldn't...

She collapsed in the floorboards sobbing in rage and terror.

She'd lost all track of time when the car stopped and Telephone Man turned the engine off. She heard movement outside. Maybe— _someone_ had to notice two grown men with a taped-up girl—

The other man hauled her out of the car and slung her over his shoulders. Upside down, she tried to kick him, but he held on to her legs. She bashed her head into his back but she couldn't hurt him. They walked through double doors, then more doors. Why hadn't someone—

The other man dumped her on something soft. She tried to wriggle off. He shoved her head back, cut the tape off her wrists, and slipped one wrist into a handcuff before she could fight back. She flailed grimly, but he was so big, and he got both her wrists and her ankles attached to—

Jessie knew what this was. She'd seen it in the hospital a million times. A gurney.

But was this a hospital?

She tried to scream through the tape, which was loose with tears and spit now. "— complete psychotic break, I'm afraid," Telephone Man was saying regretfully. "No attachment to reality whatsoever."

Someone put a needle in her arm. Jessie screamed again. It stung and it was hot—

She started to feel heavy and tired.

"... stronger sedative," Telephone Man was saying. "And risperidone..."

"Yes, Dr. Cahill."

Jessie tried to fight, but the world seemed so far away. She couldn't even move her arms and legs now.

And Mama and Papa would never...

They didn't let her wake up for a long time.

She drifted in a fog. She kept seeing Millie's body. It became Mama's body and Papa's body and most of all Kevin's body. She heard the Telephone Man's voice and screamed and tried to get away, but every time she did, the fog got thicker.

Eventually she opened her eyes, and she saw things that looked pretty real.

She didn't say anything to anyone who came in unless they said anything first. If she said the wrong thing they'd put her under again. She didn't want the Telephone Man to come back.

She had bruises on her wrists. Maybe it hadn't been as long as she'd thought.

The room didn't have a window or a clock so all she could tell time by was when the lights went off for sleep. They'd done that twice that she could remember when the door opened and Dr. Preston came in with a big burly guard.

"She's shackled, Louis," Dr. Preston said. "I think I can take it from here."

"If you're sure..."

"I am."

The door closed. Dr. Preston turned to Jessie and frowned at her. "Well, you've caused a lot of trouble, haven't you."

Jessie stared at her, afraid to say anything.

"How can you help us fix the world if you run away, Jessica?" Dr. Preston added.

Jessie didn't say anything.

The frown intensified. "They told me you weren't sedated any more. Can you hear me?"

Jessie nodded.

"I thought you _wanted_ to help us, Jessica," Dr. Preston said. Her look of disapproval deepened. "After everything we did for your brother."

"Yes," Jessie said, in a small, cracking voice. "I want to help you."

Dr. Preston's frown smoothed into a smile. "Good." She glanced down at Jessie's ankle. There were bruises there too, big fingerprints. "Oh dear."

"He shot her and and he shot her again and he grabbed me and they tied me up and—" Jessie's voice broke.

Dr. Preston's expression turned sympathetic. "I know," she said. "I know, dear. It must've all been very terrible." She came closer and stroked Jessie's hair. "It was all a big misunderstanding and he's been dealt with. He thought that drifter woman was going to attack _you_. He was trying to protect you."

Jessie didn't say anything.

"If you're a good girl you can get out of here in a few days," Dr. Preston added. "You want that, don't you?"

Jessie nodded.

"Good." Another smile. She turned to go, then turned back. "I almost forgot. I got this from your parents." She pulled something out of her bag and held it so Jessie could see.

Another Polaroid, again of Mama and Kevin and Papa around the hospital bed. But this time Kevin's head was covered in short dark stubble. He wasn't so gaunt and Mama and Papa looked about ten years younger than when Jessie had last seen them.

Dr. Preston pulled it away as Jessie stared. "It'll be waiting for you," she said. "When you get out."

#

Jessica lay still and waited for Wyatt to speak.

"You know, I was supposed to be Rittenhouse too." Lucy's voice was low. "And you do know that."

Jess suppressed her start of surprise. _You are the worst home wrecker ever_ . _Shouldn't you be off making time with my husband?_

Sure, when Jessica had returned, Lucy had bowed out. But now, after Jessica had betrayed them all and shown that she and Wyatt were past redemption as a couple?

Well, Emma thought Lucy was soft for a reason. But Emma wasn't right about everything.

"They present it to you as an inevitability," Lucy continued. "As if all your objections and acts of resistance are part of the plan."

Not for Jessica. Objections and acts of resistance were luxuries for those with no hostages. For Rittenhouse royalty. Like Lucy.

"Because it's about control. If you can convince someone..." She sighed. "That there's no way out. That any plan they could possibly make, it won't work because you're already prepared for it. That you've covered all the exits."

Lucy didn't know what Jessica had gone through. Whatever Lucy had gone through had clearly been pretty different. And yet, this tone of calm knowing—

Much as Jessica hated to admit it, they did have something in common.

"Then... they give up. And control is what Rittenhouse is all about. I... don't have to tell you that, either."

The thought of this woman swanning in and telling _Jessica_ about Rittenhouse struck her as deeply ironic, and so presumptuous. _I got my hands dirty for Rittenhouse while you were obsessing about the high school honor roll._

"It's their most fundamental lie," Lucy said softly. "But it _is_ a lie. They are not inevitable, Jess. If they were, this war would be over."

Lucy's transparent attempt to turn Jessica while she was a captive audience would have been laughable, if...

But it wasn't.

Lucy Preston was either much smarter than she looked... or she had a bigger heart than she had any right to have, after this war.

"I'll never know why or _how_ my mother protected me all those years," Lucy continued. "Jessica, I'm sorry yours couldn't, or wouldn't. I'm so sorry."

The patent ridiculousness of Lucy Preston coming into Jessica's hospital room to _apologize_ would have made her laugh if her abdomen hadn't been so sore.

And if it hadn't made her want to cry instead.

"They told you you had no choice, but they lied to you," Lucy continued. "You always had a choice. You have a choice now. Sometimes..."

A long, long silence.

"Sometimes the choice is cruel, and— and it seems it would be kinder if it didn't exist. But _it's still a choice_."

This was what Emma had never seen in Lucy. This fire that flared up every so often, changing a soft woman into an immovable mountain.

"I gave up the chance to get my sister back. Emma could tell you about her." Lucy's voice had turned bleak. "To stop Flynn." Long silence. "So... are you doing what you say because you think the choice is unbearable? Or... because you think you don't have one?"

Jessica lay silent and still, waiting for Lucy to end this.

She almost jumped when Lucy slipped a scrap of paper into her curled palm. "In case you ever need anything," she said softly.

Several more moments of silence. Then Jessica heard Lucy get up and head for the door. Then she stopped. "I... thought you should know. Your baby girl is... she's doing okay." Pause.

"You know you can do better by her than your parents did by you," Lucy said finally, and let herself out.

#

Jessie didn't try to run away again.

#

They came in the middle of the night.

Jessica woke up to gunshots. She lay still, counting and waiting, because she couldn't do anything else. Three and a half minutes later, they were at her door.

"Time to go, Mrs. Logan," a man grunted. She recognized him, but it took her a minute on his name: Earl. One of the kids Emma had taken from Nebraska. Emma had arranged for him to get some basic medical training. He quickly disconnected all the lines attached to her, and unlocked the gurney. More shots outside.

Should she ask about the baby?

Jessica swallowed.

And said nothing.

Earl hurried her out the door and into the elevator as other men lay down covering fire. An ambulance waited down below. Earl pushed her into the back, jumped in behind her, secured the gurney, and they took off at high speeds.

She lost track of time before they stopped. Earl gently transferred her to the back of a van, where there was a rudimentary bed. He gave her some strong painkiller that made her not care about all the bumps in the road.

She slept. There might've been a plane, or maybe she imagined that. Finally she was being carried into a two-story building she'd never seen before. She had no idea what part of the country they were in. All she cared about right now was somewhere she could lie down and more painkillers.

She heard voices in the next room as Earl tended her. "... Couldn't do anything else. Christopher was outside Flynn's room, and Logan was at the nursery," someone— Phil?— was saying. He was one of the old guard Rittenhouse members who'd stayed with Emma after Chinatown, when a civil war had practically split the organization. Emma had been furious they'd had to spend time fighting their own people.

"... said you didn't want a shootout in the pediatric ward," Phil added.

Wait. Logan at the nursery? Rittenhouse— Rittenhouse had gone after the baby. After Jessica's baby girl.

To take her too? Or...

or for the same reason they'd gone after Flynn?

No. No, of course not, the baby wasn't any threat to them and—

And Wyatt would really care about what happened to her— so she'd be valuable—

"Mrs. Logan?" Earl paused.

Jessica realized she'd tensed up. "Sorry," she whispered. "Hurts."

"I know. I'll be quick and then you can sleep."

She nodded.

#

"Jessica, we're sending you home."

Jessica looked up at Carol. "I am home," she said slowly.

Carol smiled. "To Texas," she clarified.

Jessica frowned. "Have I done something wrong?"

"No. Quite the opposite, in fact. Everyone's very pleased with you and we think you're ready to start your mission."

Jessica straightened up. Her mission. For the past five years she'd been learning and training for something Carol wouldn't tell her about. "When you're ready," she would always say. Jessica hadn't minded too much, because she was learning _so_ much about so many useful things, and she knew when the time came, Rittenhouse would use her as they saw fit.

And now, they finally were. Jessica felt a thrill of importance. "What is my mission?"

Carol sat down across from her and took out a picture of an underfed boy with long, shaggy blond hair, big blue eyes, and a cocky smile. "This is Wyatt Logan," she said. "He'll be at your high school this year. We want you to get to know him."

Jessica nodded and studied the picture. "Why?"

Carol hesitated. "You'll find that out later. For now, just... meet him. Befriend him."

Jessica frowned again. "Is that all? I mean, whatever I have to do," she added in a hurry. "But—"

Carol smiled. "But this doesn't sound very important."

"Well... no."

"I know. But believe me, Jessica. This will be _very_ important. We think the fate of the world might one day hinge on it. Which is why—" Carol smiled again. "We're sending you."

Jessica nodded. "Okay. When do I leave?"

"The day after tomorrow."

So soon? Jessica had been here so long now. The only reason it wasn't _hard_ to picture herself somewhere else was because she'd been taught that she might one day have to blend in anywhere. But still.

"There's something else," Carol added.

Jessica looked up.

"Your parents... well, they're not going to be expecting a lot of changes in you."

Jessica nodded. She'd called them once a week for the past four years, from "boarding school." Carol didn't tell her what to say, but she kept current a binder that had everything Jessica had already said in it. Jessica had it in front of her every time she called so she didn't slip up. She'd also seen them twice, carefully supervised visits over Christmas. It had been kind of Rittenhouse to let her keep so much connection to her old family. But no, her parents had no idea.

"It's important that you not startle them." Carol paused. "Can you remember what you were like when you first came here?"

"I don't like to."

"Try." Carol's voice was sharp.

Jessica obeyed. She thought back to a scared, naive little girl who thought she knew everything about right and wrong, who had no idea how the world really worked or how desperately it needed fixing. She thought back to a girl who...

She swallowed. "Yes."

"Good. That's the girl your parents remember, too. Keep her in mind."

"I will," Jessica promised.

Three days later, she was sitting in the bedroom she'd grown up in. She looked around. It looked so... small, so familiar and yet completely strange. She'd used to dream of coming back here, when she'd first come to Rittenhouse and was foolish and didn't understand the opportunity in front of her. Now she was here and she... kind of wanted to go back.

But Rittenhouse needed her here. So she was here.

She still shared a bedroom with Kevin. He was almost the age she'd been when Rittenhouse had found her. Jessica had envied him once because he meant more to their parents. But now she had a purpose he never would.

A hesitant knock on the door frame. Jessica looked up to see her mom standing there. "I came to see if you needed any help unpacking." Mom handed her a glass of iced tea, and gave Jessica a tentative smile. "It's so good to have you back, Jessie," she murmured. "I thought they were going to keep you forever."

It _had_ been good to see Mom and Dad again. They didn't understand, of course, and they could never know. They were simple people who'd never been able to escape the town they'd been born in, who hadn't been able to protect their children. _Child_. Hadn't been able to protect Kevin. But they were good people and they'd done their best at raising her before Rittenhouse had stepped in.

Jessica smiled at her. "Thanks, Mom."

Together they hoisted Jessica's suitcase onto the bed. Jessica unzipped it and started taking things out. She and Mom worked awkwardly around each other for a minute or two, but then got into a rhythm of Jessica unpacking and Mom hanging up or putting aside to be folded.

Mom's face turned more and more serious the more she unpacked. "I was going to ask if you wanted to do a little shopping, find you something nice before school started, but you look set." She slid two pair of jeans onto a hanger. "And they've certainly given you a generous allowance for anything they didn't send with you," she added.

She looked a little sad, and wistful. Jessica discovered that though Mom really didn't understand how the world worked, Jessica still didn't like to see her sad. "Is there, um... does Kevin need anything? I do have, I do have more than I need, I could help..."

"Oh, Jessie, that's sweet of you, but Kevin will be fine, your dad and I will get him what he needs." Mom smiled. Jessica wasn't sure if she'd actually made her less sad.

Jessica emptied the suitcase, checked all the pockets, and stuffed it under the bed. There wasn't much room in this little bedroom crowded with two beds. She started folding the pile of socks, undies, and miscellaneous.

"Mom?"

"Yes, baby?"

"I, when I was away I started going by Jessica. Do you think you could call me that?" Jessie was— Jessie was gone.

Mom looked stricken. Again, Jessica was surprised by how much she cared.

"It... is the name you and Dad chose for me, right?"

"It is." Mom managed a smile. "All right. Jessica. You'll have to cut me some slack until I get used to it." She gave Jessica a tight hug. "You grew up so much, honey. I missed you so badly."

"I missed you too," Jessica muttered.

Two and a half weeks later, she was walking through her strangest world yet: high school.

It was a surprisingly big school, because it was the only high school in the area. With the transcript Rittenhouse had prepared for her, Jessica had no trouble enrolling in the most advanced classes sophomores were allowed to take. The transcript was a fake, but it wasn't a lie. She knew she knew more than any other kid starting here. About normal things like math and English, and not-so-normal things about fighting and shooting and making do.

She kept her eyes open for Wyatt Logan, but she didn't see him. She did see some people she'd used to be friends with in elementary school, who barely recognized her and were shocked to see her again. Jessica didn't have much to talk about with them any more, but it gave her a place to sit at lunch.

But school was easy. She spent her free period in the library every day, usually blowing through her homework and then reading everything she could get her hands on. The library was small and pathetic compared to everything she'd had access to at Rittenhouse. She really missed all those books.

Home was an awkward dance between her trying to get used to living in a normal house again with different people who thought they were in charge of her, and Mom and Dad trying to give her slack after she'd been away for so long. They treated her like she was just there because she wanted to, like she was a guest, almost.

And Kevin was a _brat_.

He hadn't been any more thrilled to suddenly be sharing a bedroom with the sister he barely remembered than she'd been to be sharing with an eight-year-old boy who was allergic to hygiene. He stunk and he snored and he whined and he had an incredible range of really annoying noises that he made almost at random. _I saved your life for_ this? she thought one night, when she was trying to do her algebra homework and Kevin had just flown his toy helicopter right by her nose for the seventh time, with loud and totally unrealistic _fsh-sh-sh-sh_ noises.

Then she felt really disloyal. Because after everything she'd been through—

But the point was Rittenhouse, had always been Rittenhouse. They'd saved Kevin's life because they fixed things, but it had always been about her working for them.

Mom and Dad had gotten her a secondhand bike as a coming-home present. Jessica didn't know if they thought she missed the freedom of "boarding school," or just were trying to avoid having another kid in the house asking to go places all of a sudden. Either way, it worked. In the evenings when she got her homework done, she'd ride down to the public library, which was barely better than the school library, or to the thrift store which sometimes got good books in.

And she wrote Carol twice a week as expected, short notes reporting on her mission. So far she hadn't seen Wyatt Logan at all. Was Carol sure he was supposed to be there?

"Jessie. Earth to Jessie. Jessie, come in."

Jessica snapped her eyes upward. One of her old friends, Samantha, was standing there laughing at her. "We're playing soccer in the park after school," she said. "You wanna come?" She hesitated. "You still like soccer, right?"

"Sure," Jessica said. "I'll see you there. Hey, wait. Sam."

Sam raised her eyebrows.

"I go by Jessica now."

"Right," Sam said. "You said that."

The bell rang. Jessica shoved her last bite in her mouth, the empty container in her backpack, and hurried towards her next class. She slammed bodily into someone and nearly fell over.

"Watch it," a kid growled.

She looked down at him. He looked familiar—

Oh.

"Hi," she offered. "Uh, sorry. I'm Jessica."

"Oh, really?" Wyatt Logan snapped. "Could've fooled me. I could've sworn you were blind." He pushed past her.

She stared after him.

_That_ was who Rittenhouse thought the fate of the world was going to rest on one day?

The world was in even worse shape than she thought.

The next few weeks did nothing to change her impression.

Wyatt was in her chemistry class and, surprisingly, her math class. Apparently he'd just _missed_ the first two and a half weeks of school. But he hadn't missed much by not being there. Not because the classes were worthless, but because even when he was there he slouched way down in the back and didn't do anything as far as she could tell. He seemed to make it his mission to get the teachers to write him off. He was good at it, too.

"There's a new kid in one of my classes," Jessica said at dinner one night. "He showed up like three weeks in."

"Oh?" Mom passed the rolls as Kevin slurped his spaghetti. "What's his name?"

"Wyatt Logan." Lots of kids came from outside town, but Jessica had seen Wyatt trudging along the road after school one day, so she knew he lived around her somewhere. Maybe her parents would know something to supplement the exactly nothing Rittenhouse had told her about Wyatt.

Kevin slurped another strand.

"Must be Tom Sherwin's boy," Dad said. "His daughter's son. He lives in that little trailer on the west edge of town."

"Oh, that's right." Mom's tone indicated disapproval of _something_ , and Jessica's ears perked up. "Marlene married Kenny Logan, didn't she. Poor woman," she added under her breath.

_Slurp._

"Well, if Kenny's kicked the bucket can't say anyone would be much sorry," Dad said. "But now that you mention it, Jessie...ca, I heard something in the barber shop the other day about a runaway. Wonder if Wyatt's left his dad to live with his grandpa."

"Is his mom alive?" Jessica looked between her parents.

Mom shook her head. "We heard she was dead ten years ago, now. Tom was real shook up about it. He and Leah's boy died in the service and she was all he had left." Mom looked across the table at Jessica. "Why the sudden interest in Wyatt Logan?" Her voice took on a mischievous edge.

"Well, he's kind of a walking disaster," Jessica said, "so I was wondering if there was—"

_SLUUUUURP_.

"Speaking of walking disasters," Jessica snapped, wheeling on Kevin, "you are _revolting_." God, nothing in Rittenhouse's training had prepared her to deal with an eight-year-old boy.

"Kids," Dad said warningly.

"Kevin, don't slurp," Mom added, like ten minutes too late.

Kevin looked at her. "We didn't need you back, you know. You coulda stayed at boarding school if you were gonna be so stuck up—"

" _Kevin_ ," Dad snapped.

Kevin subsided.

"Apologize to your sister," Mom bit out, pale-faced.

"... sorry," Kevin muttered.

"No dessert for you. And I made chocolate pudding," Mom added, starting to clear the table. "Your sister can have yours."

" _Mooooooooooom_ —" Kevin whined.

"Too bad," Dad said. "Next time think before you open your mouth."

Jessica ate her chocolate pudding and thought about how weird it was to have her parents defend her after all these years. She came back and they just... took her in again with no questions asked.

Jessica hoped whatever Rittenhouse was planning, they... left them out of it.

She wrote to Carol that she'd finally seen Wyatt, and got back the reply, _befriend him_. "Right," Jessica muttered, reading it and then ripping it to shreds that she could flush. "Sure. Simple."

She kept trying, but Wyatt Logan kept looking at her like she had some hideous skin disease. God, she wanted to wring his scrawny little neck. Clearly the reason Rittenhouse wanted her to befriend him was because he was too socially inept to ever make his _own_ friends.

Maybe that actually wasn't too far off. She only ever saw him with other kids who liked to sit in the back of the classroom, but she didn't think they were _friends_ as much as convenient allies.

Then one day she walked around the corner on her way to the library and saw him behind the building with three other guys. But they _definitely_ weren't friends.

Wyatt had blood streaming down his face and his eyes looked a little glazed, but he was on his feet and circling. Well, staggering. Each of the other guys was a lot bigger than he was. Together, they made like four of him.

One of them aimed a casual punch at Wyatt's midsection. It connected, and Wyatt groaned, coughed, and stumbled back.

Oh, God. Forget Rittenhouse, intervening here was practically an act of charity. This was just _pathetic_.

None of them heard her until she deliberately dropped her backpack with a loud _thunk_. The one closest to her started to tell her to buzz off. Thanks to Rittenhouse's training, she had him on the ground within five seconds. He got up and she floored him again. Wyatt slugged one; the last one looked between her and Wyatt, bewildered as to how things had suddenly gone so wrong, and fled; and his friends staggered after him.

Wyatt panted, spat some blood out, and looked up and saw her for the first time. "Who asked you to get involved?"

"You're _welcome_ , you stupid little fucker," she snapped.

Oh, shit. She was supposed to be _befriending_ him.

Wyatt stared at her. Then he gave her a slow smile that— she wasn't sure what this feeling was, but she'd never felt it before. "Didn't know a goody two-shoes like you even knew that word."

_Annoyance_ , that must definitely be what this feeling was. Definitely. "You'd know all about a limited vocabulary."

He snorted. "I guess you don't hit too bad. You know. For a _girl_."

"Aren't you a bit old to be in the _girls have cooties_ stage still?" she snapped. "I mean, my brother thinks that and he's _eight_."

Wyatt looked her up and down, just fast enough that she didn't want to slug him. "You might have a point."

She was startled and frustrated to feel herself go warm. What was _wrong_ with her? "You should go to the nurse."

"What for?"

"'cause you have blood running down your face, you moron."

He looked down and wiped his face. "Had worse."

She crossed her arms over her chest. "If you're trying to impress me, it's not working."

"Why the hell'd I be trying to impress _you?_ "

He sounded so bewildered she couldn't help laughing. "What were you even fighting about?"

He shrugged and gave her a cocky smile, or tried to. "Stupid guy stuff you wouldn't understand."

She rolled her eyes and hoisted her backpack. "Well, I have actual _work_ to do, Logan." She headed for the library.

"Hey, uh... see you around, Cody."

It was only later that she realized she'd never told him her last name, and because she was the only Jessica in both the classes they shared, he'd never heard it at roll call, either.

So he'd asked about her.

#

Jessica limped very slowly and cautiously into what served as their kitchen. It was late, but Emma was sitting up with a laptop and a cup of coffee. She didn't look good. Two bullets and the necessary emergency surgery had taken their toll.

Jessica took a seat to gather her strength for the trip to the refrigerator. She could've asked someone for help, but it was time to start doing things for herself. Rittenhouse members didn't coddle themselves.

Emma glanced up and went back to her work, frowning. Jessica took her time and got some food. "Want anything?"

Emma shook her head. Jessica carried her plate to the table and started eating.

"Sorry about your baby," Emma said after a while, looking up. "We'll get it back."

Jessica nodded, feeling strangely touched and...

confused.

She'd looked forward to raising her baby in the family she'd known ever since she was a child. So what was this unexpected feeling of... _relief?_

Whatever it was, the time to puzzle it out was definitely not when sitting across from a dangerously perceptive Emma Whitmore. Jessica had seen with her own eyes what Emma did to people she considered insufficiently committed to the cause. Seen what she did to mothers trying to protect their daughters.

After a while Emma closed the laptop, new frown lines etched into her face. "Lucy is our biggest threat now."

"I didn't think you thought that highly of her."

"I don't. She's weak. But she and Rufus were the moral centers of that team."

Was it... difficult to work beside someone, kill them, and then speak their names so casually?

Jessica didn't know. Rittenhouse had never asked that of her. And— and anything for the cause, of course.

But...

She still remembered her sick feeling of surprise when Emma had told her Rufus was dead. This was why Jessica had taken Jiya and the Lifeboat. No blood, no killing. They might even have turned Jiya loose eventually, if Jessica could have persuaded them she wasn't a threat with the Lifeboat in Rittenhouse's hands.

Now Emma was doing it the hard way.

"She's weak, but she's too stupid to know when to quit," Emma added. "She won't give up until we grind her down so nothing's left. Which wouldn't be a problem, and I'd really _enjoy_ that—" A quick smile flitted across her face. "But she's surrounded by people who _aren't_ weak and who look to her for direction."

"I got the impression Agent Christopher was in charge," Jessica said after a minute. She knew Emma valued her observations from her time in the bunker, even if they disagreed about the conclusions.

"Of their ops, sure. But Christopher is a pragmatist. She wouldn't have made it this far otherwise. She's lost people, lost teams, before. Eventually, she'll accept this as another one she can't win, and move on. If she doesn't, her superiors will make her. Or Rittenhouse will get to her."

Jessica laid this view side by side with her own observations of Agent Christopher. They weren't jarringly different, and yet...

"Mason? He's an engineer. He's happiest buried in the technical details, not addressing social problems. Give him another new challenge and enough booze and it won't be too hard to convince him to bury himself and his conscience in it. Jiya? She's young and bereaved. She won't take up this cause. And the soldiers?" Emma glanced sideways at Jessica.

Jessica was still, but not _too_ still, because she wouldn't fool anyone if she pretended she didn't care about Wyatt at all but... still.

"Flynn, and your husband?" Emma added. "They're dangerous, but their fault lines are clear. Take Lucy from them, let them carry the guilt of losing her, and it'll only take a little push to send all that focus off onto less threatening trajectories." She paused. "Flynn can't be allowed to live, of course. But he'll be easier to take down once he's had time to stew in his failure. Who knows, we might not even have to do it ourselves. Wyatt?"

Jessica kept her face neutral.

"Who knows," Emma said after a minute. "We point him in some other, safer direction, and maybe that'll be enough. He'd always have to be watched, of course." She studied Jessica. "You could do that."

"I'm not sure I _want_ that," Jessica admitted. "I mean, if you're asking my opinion. If it's what we need, then..." She didn't have to finish that sentence; they both knew the answer.

"We'll see. Either way, Lucy's the linchpin. Kill her, or..." Emma considered. "Capturing her, letting her team mount an unsuccessful rescue attempt, and _then_ killing her would be even more effective. Flynn and Wyatt both have a metric shit ton of survivor's guilt to be exploited. But sometimes the simplest plans are best."

"And the plan for the rest of it?" Jessica asked after a minute.

"Luckily we have Ellis as our backup pilot, but we're going to have to start using the kids you trained in Iowa to offset our losses." She opened the laptop again. "We'll start in Tennessee..."

#

God damn it.

Jessica looked over the car's innards one more time, then slammed the hood shut and leaned against it. God _damn_ it.

Rittenhouse'd taught her a little about how to keep vehicles running, not a lot, but more than probably any other fifteen-year-old girl. She knew enough to know she couldn't fix the engine, even if she'd had the parts, which she didn't. And she was stuck ten miles past the back end of nowhere, which was saying something in comparison to the rest of the area.

No one ever came this way. She wouldn't have been out this way either, except Mom had owed some money to an old client who'd moved all the way out here and the lady had gotten impatient right when Mom had sprained her right ankle and Dad had gotten the flu. That left Jessica to deliver it, who technically just had a learner's permit but could handle herself on the road just fine.

Or so she'd thought.

The lady was a good seven miles back over the hills. By the time Jessica got there it would be sunset, and who would she call? She had the family's car. Dad would have to drag himself out of bed, borrow a friend's car, and come all the way out here to see what was wrong with it.

Rittenhouse had taught her to he resourceful, but they hadn't taught her how to _teleport_.

So she started walking towards town. Maybe someone would come along before she had to make the whole walk on foot.

Fifteen minutes. Thirty. She didn't have any water and she was getting thirsty, though it was November. The sun was bright and there was no shade. But if she didn't get off the road by the time the sun went down, it would get cold.

She'd covered a good three miles when she heard a car behind her. Coming pretty fast, too. She turned and waved. It didn't slow, if anything, it sped _up_.

She was _not_ walking seven miles back to town if she could possibly help it. She stepped into the road where the driver couldn't possibly not see her.

The car was still not slowing down.

She darted off the road at the same time the driver began to swerve; the car would've missed her by a lot even if she hadn't—

What the hell. That was _Wyatt_ _Logan_.

She turned and stared.

The brake lights lit, the car slowed, then it shot towards her again and stopped with screeching tires. Wyatt leaned over and threw open the door. "Get in."

She wasn't going to argue with a ride into town, no matter how strange. She'd barely closed the door when he practically floored it, throwing her towards the dashboard.

"What're you doing out here?" He glanced in the rearview mirror.

"Running an errand for my mom, the car broke down about three miles back." She frowned at him. "What're _you_ doing out here?"

She didn't know when his birthday was but he was in her grade, so she was willing to bet he was also skating on the wrong side of the law with a learner's permit.

"Joyriding."

She gave him a skeptical look. "Then why'd you nearly run me down?"

"I, uh. Thought you were someone else." He took a turn onto an unmarked dirt road without noticeably slowing down. Jessica was glad she'd put her seatbelt on. "What's wrong with the car?"

"It started smoking." She described what had happened and what she'd seen under the hood.

God, she hoped it wasn't too bad. She was here because Rittenhouse had sent her, but she still didn't like seeing her parents worry about money. It reminded her too much of... before.

"I gotta drop something off, then I could give you a ride back there and take a look," Wyatt offered. "Save your dad the tow truck."

Another skeptical look. "You know anything about cars?"

Though if this one was an example... she was damn sure it hadn't come off the lot like this.

"I do." He glanced in the rearview mirror.

They hadn't exactly become best buddies since the day she'd helped him fight those boys, but they'd become friendly enough. Once in a while, in math class, he'd drop his tattered backpack into the seat behind her, and spend the class period actually trying to pay attention and take notes, swearing under his breath most of the time. Occasionally she'd turn around, glance at his paper, point to where he'd gone wrong, and turn back around before the teacher could catch her or Wyatt could swear at _her_. The few times they did talk, well, he didn't mind when she was blunt. And Jessica found she liked that.

Wyatt glanced behind them again.

Driving fast out in the middle of nowhere. Almost didn't stop. Checking behind him constantly. Had to drop something off. The penny dropped. "Are you _smuggling?_ "

" _Don't_ —" Wyatt swerved to avoid a huge divot in the road. "Ask me that."

Which was about the same as raising his hand and saying, _Hi, my name's Wyatt Logan and I'm running contraband_ , she thought. " _Why?_ "

"'cause my granddad's living on Social Security and disability and if I don't we don't eat," he snapped. "You should see meals at our place, Jess. Each of us trying to pretend we're more not hungry and eat slower than the other. It's a real riot."

Something about that made her heart ache. She remembered being hungry before Rittenhouse. Things were better now, Mom and Dad had gotten their feet under them in the five years she'd been away, once Kevin's medical bills were paid and they had one less mouth to feed, and there was always food in the house. But she _remembered_.

"One run'll feed us for a week," he added.

"Come to dinner sometime," she said. "Bring your granddad."

He clearly didn't know how to take that.

"I'm serious. I mean, you gave me a lift, anyway..." She paused. "You _stopped_ with contraband in the car?"

"Couldn't just leave you on the side of the road." He glanced sideways. "Your folks let you bring home strays, huh?" He attempted a crooked grin.

Jessica actually had not invited any of her friends over for supper. They felt like... props she was using to support a role. They were fine to be around, but they had _no idea_ about— about anything.

Neither did Wyatt, so she couldn't tell why being around him felt so different.

"Mom's hurt and Dad's sick," she said, "but when they're better."

"Is he gonna be okay?" Wyatt's voice was suddenly shadowed, and way old beyond fifteen.

"He's just got the flu." She looked at him, but he didn't elaborate.

Wyatt turned onto an even bumpier road. "You gotta close your eyes or we could both be in deep shit."

"O... okay." She put her hands over her eyes for good measure. The ride just got worse and worse until Wyatt stopped hard. He barreled out of the car, and she heard him open the trunk and move stuff for a few minutes before the car rocked when he returned and slammed the door.

They headed back towards her car. "So, uh... really think the world's gonna end on New Year's?" he asked after a few minutes.

"Why? Oh, 'cause of that computer thing? No, I don't."

"Not big into doom and gloom, huh?"

Carol had mentioned it shortly after 1999 had started, after some local controversy. Nothing was going to go wrong, according to her. Rittenhouse had looked into it, she'd said, and applied pressure where necessary. That was what they did: fixed things behind the scenes, that people never knew about, so the world could keep going as it needed to.

"Not really," Jessica said.

Wyatt not only knew what had gone wrong with the car, he had the part to fix it in the back of his own. "Okay," she admitted. " _Now_ I'm a little impressed."

He glanced up, gave her a crooked cocky grin, and bent over the engine again, grease smeared across his face.

A few minutes later and he got the engine to roar back to life. "Your dad should get it looked at," he said, "but it'll get you back to town."

"Thanks." The day would've been a lot shittier if he hadn't come by. "I, uh, I owe you one."

He made a dismissive gesture.

"And I was serious about dinner."

He gave her an odd look. "Yeah, uh... sure, maybe." He wiped his face with his shirt, and—

_...huh._

He _was_ scrawny, but he was surprisingly muscled, too. Then he dropped his shirt and Jessica realized she was kind of staring and she... stopped.

"Right, I'll, um, thanks. Again. Yeah."

Wyatt followed her into town, going past his own turn, only peeling off when she reached the entrance to her neighborhood.

#

With Jessica recovering from major surgery, Emma didn't send her out to recruit or train. Rittenhouse demanded their people not hold anything back, but Emma was pragmatic. Having Jessica curled up on the floor in agony, or worse, bleeding again, wouldn't help anyone.

Instead, she had Jessica monitoring all the intel coming in from their usual sources, keeping an eye on the old Rittenhouse members as well as watching for any hint of the Lifeboat team. It was a job Jessica could do sitting or even lying down. She suspected Emma had given it to her because the possibility of finding some information on her baby would motivate her even beyond Rittenhouse normal.

It was also a job that gave her long stretches of time alone. And in those stretches, it got harder and harder to pretend this pain was only physical.

She could assert her loyalty to Rittenhouse all she wanted. Still, foremost in her mind was the overwhelming, primal longing for the baby she'd carried for eight months and then, effectively, lost. It comforted her mind-wise to know her daughter was still out there, somewhere, hopefully being well cared for. But the rest of her?

But there was an even worse pain. She _wanted_ her baby back with her more than she'd wanted almost anything, ever. But the more time passed, the more she struggled to deny her nagging unease about having her daughter here.

Rittenhouse had done everything for her, _made_ her something when she'd been nothing. But...

But.

"... Miz Logan? You all right?"

Jessica jumped, which was shameful and also made her incision ache. Worst of all was being caught in _tears_. She wiped her face hastily. "I'm fine," she said quickly. "Just time for another round of painkillers. I can't, uh, seem to shake this pain yet."

At least, if someone had to catch her like this, it was one of the soldiers from the 19 th  century and not one of the old guard. Tom was one of the most fundamentally decent of them all, she thought, which wasn't going to be good for him when Emma finally figured that out. Or maybe she already had. There was nothing really keeping the soldiers here except gratitude.

They'd already had one desertion, and Emma had steamed, knowing they just didn't have the _people_ to track him down and make him regret it the rest of his short life, as they would've before.

"That, uh," Tom said. "Wasn't common back home, that's for sure. The operation, I mean." His cheeks flushed faintly pink, possibly from talking about childbirth with a woman. "Usually mostly on, uh, dead women," he added. "But they say they survive here."

"Um... yes." Yeah, this was really what Jessica needed to cheer her up: a nice chat on maternal mortality.

He shook his head. "This place is amazing."

"You need something?"

"Oh, uh, no, just... not much to do until..." He shuffled his feet a little awkwardly. Tall and long-legged, he gave the impression of a colt who'd never quite figured out what to do with his limbs. "We take another trip. You, uh, know what the plan is?"

"Ask Emma." Jessica didn't know and even if she did, giving out information before Emma chose to disseminate it was risky.

"Right." He looked disappointed. "I'll, uh, leave you to your work then. You need anything?"

She shook her head and didn't attempt a smile. It probably would've looked like a grimace.

 

#

Something uncomfortable dug into her butt. Probably part of a beer can. It was trashy down here by the creek, but it was private, which was why she came. She dug the metal out of the dirt and tossed it away behind her.

She wasn't crying because she was _sad_. She hadn't done that since she was a child. She was furious. Furious with how someone had made her feel and with herself for letting him make her feel that way. She had a purpose. Why the hell should she care what ugly name a boy called her?

"Jess?"

She wiped her eyes quickly and looked up.

"Thought that was your bike—" Wyatt frowned down at her. "... you okay?"

From his voice, his posture, it was like he was having two different impulses: _Crying girl alert! Crying girl alert! Danger warning flee! But... but girl is_ friend...?

_Error. Error. Await instructions_.

It would've been funny if she hadn't been so pissed.

And they _had_ become friends. Improbably. But it hadn't been a hardship to do what Rittenhouse wanted. Wyatt was more than a little rough around the edges, and his impulse control was... nonexistent, but on the inside he was a real good guy.

She moved so he could sit. "My soon-to-be-ex called me a slut." For having an informed _opinion_ on—

"He _what?_ "

Yeah, about that no impulse control thing— Jessica grabbed Wyatt's belt as he tensed to spring to his feet, face dark. "I don't need anyone to beat him up for me."

Slowly, Wyatt relaxed. "Nah, I know. You're a do-it-yourself kinda girl."

"If I need anything," Jessica muttered, "it's a hug."

God, why did this _hurt_ like this? It was just a name. She knew she didn't have to believe what some idiot thought. Except she'd been fooled enough by this idiot to date him, so maybe _that_ was what hurt. Her pride, her sense of being a good judge of character. Of knowing how to look out for herself, like Rittenhouse had taught her.

Wyatt eyed her like she was made entirely out of poison ivy.

Right, _of course_ that was too much to ask of a boy. Even the one who was maybe probably one of her closest friends. Somehow. The thing about it was, he'd never known her before, so he had no idea how much she'd changed. And, ironically, she felt like she could be more open with him than almost anyone else. Not about Rittenhouse, of course. He wouldn't understand. Carol had said that most of the world wasn't ready to hear about them yet, and Jessica believed her. She still didn't know what they wanted with him but she hoped it was they were going to recruit him. He'd be good. He believed in helping people. How Rittenhouse had known about him when he was so young, she had no idea, but she'd learned long ago not to question what Rittenhouse did.

Long, long ago.

... the point was, she didn't tell him about Rittenhouse, the main thing in her life, but she could tell him almost anything else.

Gingerly, he put his arm around her shoulders. He'd left so much space between them that his hand rested on her far shoulder. He patted that shoulder awkwardly.

Well, hey. Points for effort.

"How's your grandpa?" she asked. And then just looking at his face, that gave her the answer. "... I'm sorry."

"Just another bad night," Wyatt said after a minute.

"Wyatt Logan, I swear, you are the worst liar."

He looked sideways at her, and smiled reluctantly. "He's got another appointment next week," he said after a minute. "See if they can figure it out."

"Hope they can." She'd only met Mr. Sherwin a few times, and he was a polite, rather wry old gentleman, but even she could tell he was always tired. And he wasn't getting better.

"Yeah."

After a while she straightened up. "I gotta get home." She had homework. "Thanks for not running away from my girlie feelings."

Another reluctant grin. "Hey, you working Friday night?"

She nodded. She waitressed at a diner, now. She still didn't know what Rittenhouse wanted with her, and she was waiting on that, but after... what had happened when she was a kid, she was never gonna be broke and helpless again if she _could_ help it. Plus she had a car, now, to keep up and pay the insurance and gas and all that.

The hours were awful and if not for the education Rittenhouse had given her she would've actually been struggling to keep up in school. But she made a lot in tips. She was _actually_ a good waitress... and she was pretty and blonde.

"I get off a little after you close," he said. "I can pick you up and we can drive into the hills, watch the meteors if you want."

She hesitated.

"Oh, come on. You can't take _one_ night off from busting your ass to wipe this place's dust off your heels?"

"I guess I never figured you for a stargazer."

He shrugged. "Sounds like we could both use a break, and it's cheaper than the movies."

Right. While she could've paid for movie tickets, if she'd thought it was actually worth it, what he made went to put food on the table. And if she'd offered to pay for both of them that would've been too much like a date, and...

She couldn't say it hadn't crossed her mind. Wyatt was impulsive and made terrible choices and was probably not at all the kind of guy Mom wanted her to date, let alone Carol, but he was also loyal and brave and even smart and sweet, if you could get him to show it.

Plus he was, you know, not exactly hard to look at.

Mom and Dad didn't put up a lot of fuss about her comings and goings now that she worked. Did they even know when the diner closed? "Okay. Sure."

Friday night he was waiting in that ancient pickup. She climbed in the front seat, careful of the door that liked to come half off if you handled it wrong. The night was chilly and the truck didn't have heat; Wyatt could fix just about anything with an engine— in fact, he worked for a mechanic— but he'd said the parts were too expensive. So she grabbed the blanket from the back shelf and wrapped it around her.

"Bad shift?" he asked.

"I swear." Her mutter trailed into a hiss. "Some day I'm gonna break some handsy bastard's bones."

"Can't you work somewhere else?"

"The money's good."

He made some wry noise of understanding and left it at that.

The truck rumbled along the bumpy road. It got, what, a half mile to the gallon, practically? The movies might actually've been cheaper. "Can I give you gas money?"

"No." He sounded affronted.

"I should've driven."

He made a scoffing noise. "You think I wanna ride in that little clown car of yours, Cody?"

"Hey, it gets great mileage."

He made it clear he was unimpressed.

" _And_ , all the _doors_ work, Logan."

"Yeah, yeah."

They parked at the top of the ridge, farther out than where everyone went to make out. She was glad they had the place to themselves. They leaned against the back window and stared up at the sky. Those five years in San Francisco, Jessica had really missed the stars.

A meteor streaked across the sky, then another. Okay, he'd been right. This _was_ nice.

But he didn't seem to think so. He was tense, not relaxing.

"What?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Nothing."

They sat a while longer. She wrapped the blanket more tightly around herself.

"Hey, uh, Jess?"

"Yeah?"

He didn't say anything. He looked confused— conflicted— something. He frowned, then dug his keys out of his pocket and handed them to her.

"You want me to drive home?" She frowned. "... have you been _drinking?_ "

Something, was it fear? tightened around her heart. She liked Wyatt, she did, but after remembering how Dad had disappeared into a bottle when Kevin was sick, she didn't have any patience for Wyatt's playing fast and loose with booze. She was old enough to know now it was a miracle Dad had found his way back again, or maybe Rittenhouse had helped there too, she didn't know.

But she knew Wyatt would sneak something onto the school grounds, occasionally, or she'd ridden with him once when he'd clearly had one too many and she'd sworn never to do it again. And if he'd been drinking _tonight_ , that meant it had been at work, which was just— really bad.

"What? No. I told you, I wouldn't do that again when I was driving you."

"Then why'd you just hand me your keys?"

"Wanna go out sometime?" he blurted.

She stared at him.

He winced. "Oh God, that sounded a lot smoother in my head. You just looked so— y'know, fierce and beautiful—"

She leaned forward and kissed him hard.

No matter what those bodice rippers of Mom's said, the sudden collision of skin and lips and tongues never felt romantic. But then he made a startled noise into her mouth and grabbed the back of her neck and— oh, God, _yes_.

She pulled back a few moments, or maybe decades, just far enough to look at him. His face was cupped in her hands. Her heart raced. She felt _good_.

She'd have to— she'd have to tell Carol about this, of course, but maybe if _befriending_ was good, making out was even better, right? Right now, her body really, really wanted her to go with that rationalization.

"Does that answer your question?" she whispered.

"It. Uh." He stared at her. "It... gives me an idea, yeah."

"Good." She glanced down at his mouth. He took the hint and leaned forward and kissed her again.

She basically crawled into his lap. He twined one hand through her hair and put the other on her hip, holding her in place at just the right angle— his lips, warm and chapped and insistent, slid across hers, and oh God, where'd he learned to be this good with his _tongue?_

She swallowed a soft groan. That all went on for a while, until he made a desperate noise and pulled away and shifted her off his lap and tried to casually adjust how he was sitting, as if she hadn't already noticed. "I should, uh. Get you home," he managed. "Before your dad gets out his shotgun."

She adjusted her shirt, grabbed the keys, and followed him over the side of the bed. She headed for the driver's side— but so did he. "I thought you wanted me to drive."

He shook his head. "I just... I didn't want you to feel trapped." He gave her a sheepish smile.

She stared at him again. His smile faded.

She pushed him up against the truck and kissed him again, licking into his mouth slowly and thoroughly, relishing the way his noise of surprise turned into half-swallowed groans. Finally she pulled away. "Thank you," she panted.

He looked at her like he was gonna need a refresher course in how words worked.

She rode back snuggled up to his side. Once they reached the flatter part of the road and he didn't need to shift so often, he took her hand in his. She was sorry when they reached the diner parking lot. He kissed her one more time, and then got out and helped her down.

"I'll, uh." Her turn to fumble for words. "I'll see you around." Her voice came out a lot shyer and breathier than she'd intended.

He smiled at her. That slow smile was so damned _unfair_ it sent warmth curling from her toes to her—

Leaving. Right.

He watched her until she was safely in her car, but she knew he would've done that anyway, even if they hadn't just reached second base in the back of his truck. Wyatt Logan was good people. And she was pretty sure she'd be adding more descriptors to that list.

#

Ellis managed to get the Mothership home from 1892 Memphis, despite having a gut wound so bad Tom'd had to carry him back to the Mothership. Jessica was privately impressed the man was even alive. But Emma was quietly furious.

At least Emma was still an adult when she was angry. She never took her anger out on anyone who didn't deserve it, wasn't involved. Unlike some other people Jessica had known. But it was still... being in the room was like being uncomfortably close to a lightning strike though you knew you were safe.

"You rounded up an angry mob and you _still_ didn't manage to kill any of the Team or even keep Ida there, which was your primary objective?" she demanded.

"No ma'am." Tom stood stolidly at attention. It was an indication of how uneasy he felt, falling back on old habits like that. But he didn't flinch.

Emma made him explain for at least another half hour, though she _was_ actually listening, not just making him talk about the failure to make him feel bad. Emma never bothered with trivial punishments like that. Finally she dismissed him.

"What will it take to squash those cockroaches?" Emma demanded. "They're down a soldier _and_ a pilot and they still not only preserve history but shoot _our_ pilot." She stared into space for a moment or two. "It's time to play a little hardball, I think."

"If you, uh, don't need me," Jessica said. "I'm going to go check with Earl. I was thinking he might need another pair of hands to treat Ellis."

Emma shook her head absentmindedly, and Jessica made her escape.

Emma's idea of hardball turned out to be trying to capture Michelle Christopher and her children. Jessica _knew_ Denise was standing in Rittenhouse's way, and they couldn't let one person keep them from saving the world, right?

But—

But the younger one, Olivia, she was only like _eleven_ , and—

And then it turned out Agent Christopher had evacuated her family weeks ago and somehow maintained the pretense that they'd been there the whole time. Emma was furious. Jessica was _horrified_ to feel a little relief.

If Carol had been here maybe Jessica could've talked with her. Because Carol had been a true believer but she'd understood that other people weren't visionaries like her, that sometimes they had trouble seeing the bigger picture. But Carol wasn't here because—

Carol had betrayed Rittenhouse. She'd chosen Lucy.

_Had_ she betrayed Rittenhouse? Or had she betrayed _Emma's vision_ for Rittenhouse?

Nicholas, after all, had wanted Lucy dead, but definitely hadn't condoned Emma's execution of Carol for interfering. Had Emma killed Carol because of her own loyalty to Rittenhouse? Or because of their power struggle? Had that been what was good for Rittenhouse, or just what was good for Emma?

Anyway, Carol wasn't here. Jessica had no one to talk her down, explain how what was happening wasn't really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Reassure her it was a necessary evil for saving the world.

And there was no one else Jessica could talk to. So she said nothing at all. The days passed. Ellis slowly got better, but developed a nasty infection, for which Earl put him on some stronger medicine.

One night Jessica woke in the middle of the night to the faint sound of the Mothership starting up. She sat bolt upright, then sprinted out of bed and towards the bay, ignoring the stabbing pain in her abdomen as she did. Emma hadn't planned another mission—

She reached the time machine bay right behind Emma, just as the Mothership disappeared.

Jessica had never seen Emma open-mouthed before.

Jessica glanced at the screen. "Uh, August 24 th , 1922," she reported.

Earl staggered into the bay. Emma leveled her gun at him before she recognized him. "Oh God," Earl muttered when he saw the missing time machine. He had a vivid red mark across his face.

"What happened?" Emma demanded, gun pointedly not put away.

Earl shook his head. "All of a sudden he just started raving, and when I tried to calm him down he slugged me with a tray." He squeezed his eyes shut in pain. "He ran out here."

Emma was quiet for several long, scary moments. Then she turned to Jessica. "Have you found the team yet?"

"You would know if I had." Jessica stood her ground. "I have some leads, all near the west coast. Reno, Vancouver, and Frisco."

"We'll start with Reno and Frisco. We find the team, we get a time machine back. _And_ your kid," she added, heading back into the house with her mouth a grim, tight line.

They sent people to scout in those two cities. Jessica knew it was killing Emma not to have the people to move faster. And Jessica herself...

She forced herself to think about what it would mean for Emma to find her daughter. She'd told Wyatt she had to stay with Rittenhouse to protect her baby, but now—

Rittenhouse had done what they needed to do to make her an effective tool. But _could_ she stand by and watch as her own daughter was taped, restrained, and tossed in the back of a car? Or was she just another weak mother? She didn't let her mind skate away from that memory like usual.

Because if she _couldn't_... she'd seen what had happened to Carol.

God, maybe she should let Emma kill her if it was that or betray Rittenhouse for the sake of her own weak emotions. But every fiber of her being revolted at the idea.

Three days later, she was in the kitchen when a tremendous explosion threw her against the refrigerator.

She couldn't indulge herself in being stunned and pained. She forced herself to listen— couldn't hear much— forced herself to her knees— grabbed her gun— found cover, swept the hallway, got closer—

No, not an explosion. The Mothership had returned and landed off-target, entirely demolishing one of the back bedrooms.

Emma was already getting the hatch open. Inside, Ellis was slumped on the floor. Jessica didn't need Emma checking for a pulse to know he was dead or dying. But he'd gotten the Mothership back.

#

It took her several slow, painful years to realize Wyatt was kind of an asshole.

Maybe it took him several years to _become_ an asshole. She never was sure.

Carol was very pleased when Jessica wrote her the truth and pleased again when Wyatt asked Jessica to marry him, towards the end of their senior year, just six months after that night in his truck. _Wyatt has important decisions ahead of him_ , Carol wrote. _We think with you by his side he can make the right ones_. Jessica was relieved and ecstatic that the people who really mattered, who had the final say, approved.

They married after graduation, because Dad was adamant no daughter of his would ever marry before she'd finished her schooling. _It's about ten years too late for you to be overprotective_ , she thought. But— no. No. Rittenhouse had been a good thing. Rittenhouse had been the best thing.

It was just Jessica and Wyatt and the minister and Jessica's family and a friend or two, because Tom Sherwin had died earlier that year. And Jessica wasn't often tempted to tell Wyatt the whole truth, but when she was...

When she was, it wasn't even thinking of Carol and the T—

And other Rittenhouse members, who stopped her. Not really. It was knowing that Wyatt's granddad had died of cancer and no one had come to _him_ with a miracle cure.

They were married and they spent two nights in El Paso for their honeymoon. And then Wyatt enlisted.

She'd known he was going to, he'd been up front about that. In one way she was glad, because she loved Wyatt dearly but he was _reckless_. Maybe the military could stuff some sense into him. And she wanted to get out of that little town, not be just one of another generation who lived and died there. Once she'd thought Rittenhouse would get her out of there by giving her a place in some grand plan, but that hadn't happened yet.

But on the other hand, she quickly learned how lonely the life of a military wife was.

She found work as a bartender, which was a step up from waitressing in terms of money and the fact that there was usually a solid physical bar separating her from handsy customers. She worked steadily because she had nothing else to do. Wyatt was gone, Rittenhouse didn't need her, and she had trouble making friends with the other wives. They were just a little too cliquish for her. And they looked down their noses at her when they found out what she did for a living, or even that she _did_ work for a living.

Okay, maybe that wasn't fair; probably most of them, who didn't say anything, didn't give a damn. But at least one of them point-blank told Jessica that she and Wyatt should've planned better and conceived a baby before he'd left.

Then the years started bringing disillusionment after disillusionment. Wyatt started drinking more. Their fights turned nasty in a way they never had before. He started looking at other women sometimes, really _looking_. He told her he was faithful and she believed him, but she also had eyes. And... it really hurt.

Worse than any of those things was when he came back from his second deployment as someone she barely recognized, someone living in a dark, inaccessible place inside himself.

She almost panicked and called Carol, but Rittenhouse meant self-reliance. Instead she found a civilian counselor herself and then basically forced Wyatt to go, raiding the savings she'd worked so hard to build when their insurance wouldn't cover it. She tried to hide her tears and her fears, and her guilt that she clearly wasn't enough for him or he wouldn't be like this.

Slowly, little by little, he came back to her. As she held him at night, she thought she could forgive and forget all the other stuff.

And then he deployed again, and then went to Ranger School. She felt so torn. She was proud as hell of him, and she didn't want to keep him chained by her side. But she missed him like hell, and she worried.

He never came home so haunted again, but he never came home quite like the man she'd married, either. She missed that man.

Then there was the shock of finding out the Telephone Man was still a respected Rittenhouse superior. Jessica could've sworn Carol had said he'd been pushed out, but of course it wasn't her place to question Rittenhouse's decisions. If she could still feel the tape on her wrists—

_No._ She didn't think about that. Rittenhouse had saved her, made her. So they'd had to be a little rough in the process, so what. She'd been stubborn.

Still, she was glad to be living in San Diego, not San Francisco.

She and Wyatt had had their tenth wedding anniversary when she first suggested marital therapy, and it took her another two years to talk him into it. She felt so sick. She told herself she stayed with him because Rittenhouse needed her there. But she wanted to fix things, too. She wanted the man she loved back. It felt like she didn't know him any more.

Carol visited one day in 2016. She told Jessica a crazy, improbable story about time travel, which Jessica wouldn't've believed from anyone besides Rittenhouse. "So Wyatt's going to _disappear_?"

"The Wyatt you know will disappear," Carol said. "In his place will be a Wyatt from a timeline where you died young. He'll be part of something big. And for the sake of the world, we're going to need you to find out all about it."

Then Carol delicately hinted that Rittenhouse might need this alternate Wyatt out of the way. And Jessica just felt... numb. It felt like she'd lost him a long time ago.

And then one day he walked into her bar and clung to her like she was his everything. She realized she'd really, critically underestimated how much she'd missed the man she'd married.

It would be so easy to believe him. So easy to _want_ him again.

She was in trouble. She was in _danger_.

#

Emma was planning something big, Jessica knew that. She'd found a way to muddy the Mothership's signature, so they could make several very short jumps back and forth and have the equipment register only one. With this new ability, she was able to recruit from the 1950s when the Lifeboat team thought she was only there to kill Cesar Chavez.

One day she walked in, looking somber. "DHS took your birth family," she told Jessica.

Jessica stared at her, struggling to comprehend. Mom? And Dad? And Kevin? "What? Why?"

"Hostages, I assume." Emma watched her for a minute. "I'm sorry, Jessica."

Sorry, because Rittenhouse couldn't save them. Jessica had to write them off as lost. She nodded mechanically. Of course, anything— anything for the cause.

"What about— what about your mom?"

"She's fine, for now, and I've told her to hide." Emma's frown deepened. "We'll see if she listens." She studied Jessica a little longer, then mercifully left her alone with her thoughts.

Mercilessly. Not mercifully.

This— something about this didn't add up.

Why take Jessica's parents and brother and leave Emma's mom?

That didn't make sense at all. But if Mom and Dad and Kevin weren't hostages, then... what were they?

They couldn't be in protective custody. That didn't make any sense. That only made sense if someone expected Jessica to... to _leave_.

Well, that showed how much Agent Christopher knew. Jessica was here of her own free will, she hadn't been coerced...

And yet she felt a strange sense of freedom she couldn't quite smother.

She'd been here of her own free will, she always had been, ever since they'd released her from the hospital all those years ago. She'd been here because she _believed_.

But there'd always been a nagging sense in the back of her mind knowing that if she happened to fail Rittenhouse, they might go after her family.

No. No, Rittenhouse had _made_ her. They _were_ her family. She was going to help them save the world. She thought through it desperately, like a mantra, begging the pieces to snap back into the places they belonged. She _willed_ the rationalization to work. She _knew_ these answers, so why was one simple piece of news—

And maybe it wasn't even true. Maybe it was a lie.

Why would Emma lie about this?

To see what Jessica would do.

That was ridiculous. Emma had no reason to doubt her loyalty. She had few enough people left as it was, and besides, Jessica's _baby_ was already in Homeland Security's hands. Yet Jessica had stayed here. Wasn't that proof?

So then... it was true.

This growing feeling of freedom was one of the worst things she'd ever felt, because it shouldn't _matter_ . She was here— because she wanted to be here— because— they'd never even _threatened_ her family—

They'd never needed to, had they?

Her world was collapsing around her. And— and what did she have _left_ if— she'd given Rittenhouse everything in return for Kevin's life.

It _had_ been for Kevin's life, hadn't it? All of it.

She desperately wanted, _needed_ , all her beliefs to get back in their right places in her head instead of this... chaos. _She knew these answers_.

She just...

She didn't _like_ the answers any more.

Jessica nearly retched with the implications. A quarter of an hour and everything had fallen apart. One simple sentence, and Emma had shown Jessica the secret fear that had lay whispering in the back of her mind for the last 25 years.

And if that fear was gone...

What if for the first time in 25 years she could be free?

 

#

She didn't mean to get pregnant.

After she and Wyatt had separated for the most recent time, she'd decided to go off her birth control. It wasn't like they exactly had a normal any kind of life any more, let alone a normal sex life. And though he apparently didn't see the need to be faithful, she still did. Maybe that made her a sucker.

But— even if they reconciled, she'd be insisting on condoms until he proved he was clean. So there was no point to the pills now, and she might as well avoid the side effects.

And then a different Wyatt showed up, and suddenly, sex was on the table again.

After that night at the hospital with Lucy and JFK, when they sat down for a heart-to-heart, she asked him point-blank who he'd been sleeping with in this timeline.

He hesitated.

"Lucy?" she guessed.

"It wasn't her fault," Wyatt said.

" _Fault?_ I thought you thought I was dead, Wyatt."

"I _did_ think you were dead!"

"Then it's not anyone's fault."

Wyatt hesitated. "Yeah, but just... she would never, okay? I mean, I would never either, but I get after your timeline that's not too convincing."

"It's okay." Jessica felt a little annoyed that making sure she understood _that_ was Wyatt's priority, but at the same time, even she could tell it was true. "I know. Lucy's not exactly who Central Casting would send for a homewrecker role."

Wyatt looked relieved. "And... a Mossad agent back in 2015. That was just a one-night stand. There hasn't been anyone else since you."

So they were maybe a little sloppy with their condom usage, and Jessica fell right into that gap between perfect use and _typical_ use.

She panicked at first. What the hell was she going to _do?_ But then it turned out to be useful, when Wyatt was quick to start putting the pieces together. And even more than useful, it made Jessica _happy_.

She hadn't expected that. But the thought of raising a little girl, watching her grow up, helping save the world for her... yeah, Jessica wanted that.

Happiness alternated with fear pretty much the rest of her pregnancy. It took her a good month to tell Emma, and only then it was to extract a promise that she'd bring Jessica back to the present day before her due date. Jessica point-blank refused to give birth in the 1930s. It was dangerous, and wouldn't benefit anyone: not Rittenhouse, not her baby, not her.

#

She watched for an opportunity for days. She passed a few up. If she did this, there was no going back.

Rittenhouse had been her family. They _had_. To betray them—

If Jessica slipped up once, if she got unlucky, Emma would kill her horribly.

But Jessica's own unconcern at that idea was what finally convinced her. When she thought about it, she wasn't thinking about how she wouldn't be able to help the cause any more. She was just thinking about how her family would be safe.

One day, she slipped out. With shaking hands, she dialed the number Lucy had slipped her in the hospital long ago, that Jessica had not been able to keep herself from memorizing before she destroyed.

Lucy picked up on the second try. "Hello?"

Jessica swallowed. "Put Flynn on."

Of all of them, he was the most able to view her dispassionately. He cared about protecting his team and taking down Rittenhouse, and that was it. He of all of them wouldn't feel personally betrayed by what she'd done. Sure, he might shoot her on sight on principle, but that was still better than what Emma would do.

This numb apathy probably wasn't supposed to feel so peaceful, was it.

She didn't hear the sounds of doors, and it was only a second before Flynn said, "Yes."

Interesting.

She took a deep breath. "Are my baby, my parents, and my brother safe?"

Long pause. "Yes."

"Then... I want to come in."

Another long pause. "You don't think you've, uh, burned your bridges with this team?" He sounded incredulous.

"I can help you. You know I can."

"Why?" He sounded more curious than skeptical.

She struggled to put it into words.

"You, ah, probably should've thought up a better lie. Or _any_ lie."

"Wait!" If he hung up—

"Yes?"

"If you keep my family safe," she said finally. "Then they can't do anything to hurt me." She hesitated. "And if you really are in Reno or Frisco you better get the hell out of there because we— Emma— knows."

When he broke the silence, it was to arrange a rendezvous.

She knew it wasn't that easy. She might be greeted with a firing squad. She'd gotten her foot in the door, no more. Next she had to figure out how to actually get out of here.

But Rittenhouse hadn't trained her for nothing.

Every move she took to physically leave this place should've been nerve-wracking. It wasn't. She was aware with her mind that it was dangerous, but it didn't _feel_ dangerous. For the first time in 25 years, she was making all of her own decisions. Whatever else happened, no one could take that from her.

In retrospect, it seemed impossibly easy when she finally got to the nondescript motel Flynn had told her to come to. She parked down the street, and watched the room. The curtains were drawn, and she couldn't see movement, or even whether anyone was inside.

She didn't have to do this. She could turn around and make a run for it. She was free. She was free now.

But...

She rubbed her wrists, and started across the parking lot.

She knocked on the door. It opened into darkness, but she still wasn't afraid. Even if bullets—

Her eyes adjusted, and she stepped inside. The lights flicked on, revealing Flynn well back, leveling a gun at her—

And _Jiya_.

As Jessica put her purse on the table and raised her hands, her gaze darted to her once friend, then away. Why _Jiya?_ Did this have to do with the fact that none of them had spotted Rufus in months? Every trip, Emma said, was Jiya.

Where was Rufus?

"Gun's in the purse," she said. "Is my family still safe?"

"Yes."

Jiya searched Jessica's purse. Then she pulled something out of a pocket that looked like a tiny supermarket scanner trailing a bunch of wires, and went over it again. She looked up. "Nothing."

"Let me make this easy on you," Jessica said. "I'm going to take my jacket off." When Flynn didn't object, she very slowly suited actions to words. And then she just kept going, leaning against the table to take her shoes off. Slowly. Very—

"Uh, what are you... doing?" Jiya asked.

Jessica pulled off her top. "Avoiding a patdown where either of you have to put pressure on my surgical scar?"

"Wait."

Obediently, Jessica stopped.

"Scan it all," Flynn added.

So Jiya very thoroughly scanned each piece of clothing as Jessica removed it. Flynn watched without emotion. She even squatted and coughed for them, wincing at the pain in the stomach when she did. Then she straightened up and waited for Jiya to finish with her clothes.

Should she have felt embarrassed or something at this? Maybe she didn't was because it was her own idea. Or maybe it was because she was having trouble caring what happened to her right now.

"Get dressed," Flynn said when all her clothing came up clean.

He walked her out in front of him, gun concealed under the jacket casually draped over his arm. Jiya opened the rear door when they reached the car. Flynn motioned for Jessica to get in and slide through, then climbed in after her. Then Jiya turned in the driver's seat, leveling Jessica's own gun at her while Flynn handcuffed her wrists in front of her and blindfolded her.

At least he hadn't used tape.

Jessica was impressed despite herself. She hadn't seen any chance she might've taken to escape, if she'd been trying for that.

She lost track of time. She did try to follow where they were going, but not surprisingly, Jiya made a lot of turns. Besides, Jessica didn't know this area well to begin with. The car got colder, which did tell her they were steadily gaining in elevation.

Finally, they stopped. Flynn told her to get out and gave her very detailed verbal instructions that kept her on her feet though she couldn't see. She felt them go inside, and they seemed to pass through a couple of doors. Flynn pushed her into a chair, unlocked the cuffs, and cuffed her wrist to what felt like a table instead. He pulled off her blindfold, and Jessica found herself in front of Denise Christopher.

The Homeland Security agent could have been made from stone. She placed a little recorder on the table. "Start talking."

"Did he tell you about Reno and Frisco?" Jessica glanced at Flynn, who'd taken up position leaning against the wall, gun down but ready.

"Yes."

"Is my family safe?"

"Yes."

"Prove it."

Agent Christopher's look suggested Jessica was deeply trying her patience. But she glanced at Flynn, and he left the room.

Jessica waited for Agent Christopher to show or tell her something, but all that happened was the door opened and Flynn returned... with Dad.

Jessica's breath left her in a rush of relief... and shame. To have him see her handcuffed to the table— to know that he must know something close to the truth—

She swallowed all that. "Are you all okay?" Her voice was almost even.

"Are _we_ okay? Jessie, honey, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?"

Oh, God. Was Dad _trying_ to make her cry?

He started forward, but Flynn put out a hand to stop him. Dad stopped, but gave Flynn a sharp look that suggested he'd better not press his luck. "Which of us do you think is the threat, exactly, Mister?" Dad almost-growled. "Me? Or my daughter?"

Flynn didn't reply.

"Are you _okay_ ," Jessica repeated. "You and Mom and Kevin and— and the baby—"

"Yeah, yeah," Dad sounded a little bewildered, "can't say it hasn't been strange being uprooted in the middle of the night and then given a grandbaby we didn't know existed, but we're all just fine. And we love 'er to bits." He glanced uncertainly between Jessica and Agent Christopher. He looked so out of place here, in this world where he didn't belong.

"Thank you, Mr. Cody," Agent Christopher. "That'll be all for now."

Jessica almost smiled at the way Dad stared at Agent Christopher, letting her know _she_ was pushing her luck too. "It's okay, Dad," Jessica said softly. "Tell them— tell them I said hi and sorry?"

Two words that didn't come close to... to anything meaningful. And yet.

Dad nodded, looking even more confused than when he'd come in, and retreated through the door that Flynn was holding pointedly open.

Agent Christopher raised her eyebrows.

So Jessica took a deep breath and started with that day she'd been sitting on the front step.

She had no idea how long she talked. After about the first hour, Agent Christopher gave her a bottle of water, probably to spare her own ears the sound of Jessica's increasingly dry voice. Jessica went through three refills of the bottle and one trip to the bathroom before Agent Christopher finally called a halt.

"We'll talk again in the morning," she said. Jessica nodded. This wasn't compassion; Agent Christopher wanted time to see what of Jessica's story checked out, though if someone wasn't listening in another room and frantically doing research right now, Jessica would be shocked.

"Whose idea was it to get my family out?" she asked quietly.

Agent Christopher studied her. "Wyatt's."

Jessica swallowed. "Tell him... he was right." Except they didn't need to, did they? Obviously, he'd been right, or she wouldn't be here.

Somehow, he'd known.

They put her in a windowless room with a cot, a blanket, and an equally small bathroom. Jessica still had no idea where she was, or who else was here. Was...

Well, she hadn't heard a baby crying.

The strange numbness she'd been feeling ever since she'd decided to leave started to wear off. She felt, at the same time, more panicked than she'd ever been, and more at peace. She'd just torpedoed her entire life and put herself in the hands of people who had every reason to kill her, not to mention turned her back on _other_ people who would now want to kill her, and given up on fixing the world.

Yeah, but... the peace suggested she'd made the right choice.

The next morning she was fed and watered, making her even more curious about who was here— it was highly unlikely to be other Homeland Security agents with Flynn showing his face— and led back to the same interrogation room. It took her hours to finish telling Agent Christopher everything, and she knew there'd be hours of follow-up questions.

"It's not safe to put you in prison," Agent Christopher said. "Even a secure facility. So you'll be staying here, in our custody."

Jessica nodded. She'd expected that.

Agent Christopher slid a phone across the table. "I thought you might like to see these."

Jessica took a quick, shaky breath. Photos of an infant...

Her eyes filled with tears. With her free hand, she flicked through every photo, torn between devouring them and savoring them.

"Grace Cody Logan," Agent Christopher added.

_Cody! What the_ fuck? "Who the hell named her _that?_ " Jessica managed after a stunned handful of seconds.

Agent Christopher raised her eyebrows. "Her father?"

Oh God. Jessica was going to—

She wasn't sure.

Jessica had waltzed into the Lifeboat team's base as part of an attempt to kill them, and Wyatt had gone right ahead and named— this kid— _Grace Cody_.

What. The. Fuck.

"Flynn asked me why," she blurted, totally off-balance now. She swallowed. "I didn't have a choice in the beginning. And it was either... either cope or..." She trailed off. "When I finally did have a choice... it was too late, I'd already built everything around— around coping."

Agent Christopher watched her for a long moment, impossible to read. "You're the only Rittenhouse agent from the Keynes side of things we've managed to take alive," she said finally, "which makes me suspect either you're a double agent, or there's something different about you. Even if you're telling the truth, you still have to face the consequences for the choices you made as an adult. And they will be heavy."

Jessica nodded.

"But I'm sorry for what happened to you when you were little."

Jessica stared at her, dumbstruck. That had not even occurred to her as a thing that someone might say.

Then Agent Christopher escorted her back to that other small room, and left her with the phone for company, after assuring her it didn't have a SIM card or any antenna.

Jessica lay on the cot, feeling more like an empty shell than a human being.

She'd told them everything. _Everything_ , even— especially— where Emma's base was. She'd given up her allegiance to her family, to Rittenhouse, and given up her chance to help save the world. She didn't know what was going to happen, now.

It would've been so easy to stay, because it would've been _familiar_. For nearly her whole life, she'd had Rittenhouse and the mission to orient her. She'd had the knowledge that they valued her and wanted her to help them to ground her.

Now what did she have?

It would've been so easy to stay. But this was _right_.

_Who_ am _I now?_ she thought as she, somehow, drifted off to sleep. _Will I like her?_

#

Agent Christopher's team raided Emma's base just hours after Emma and the others got out, apparently. Jessica couldn't help being a little relieved, because on some level she still _wanted_ to believe Rittenhouse could save the world. It hurt to lose your faith.

On the other hand, the timing seemed to make Agent Christopher suspicious. But enough of the rest of Jessica's intel checked out that, after a few days, she was moved from that windowless cell to a slightly larger, very spare room with bars on the windows. She still didn't know where they were; somewhere in the Rockies, obviously. She knew she was guarded constantly, but the Lifeboat team was clearly _not_ here. If her family was here, the compound was a lot bigger than she thought and they were in another part.

More than the move, Agent Christopher promised to send someone with Grace, so Jessica could meet her.

Part of Jessica wanted to say _no, keep her away where I can never see her_ , because Grace might be safer that way. But she was too selfish. She wanted to meet this little girl she'd carried inside her own body for months.

A quick knock, the door opened—

"... I was expecting _Mom_ ," she blurted.

"Well, you got me." Wyatt's face and voice were grim. It was the first time she'd seen him since Florida.

But he was holding—

With visible reluctance, he held their baby out so Jessica could eagerly take her. Oh God, she didn't know the first thing about what she was doing. She turned away from Wyatt to hide her tears—

She'd missed so much already. But she was finally holding Grace.

The feelings overwhelmed her, joy and shock and grief. "Oh my God, her little _toes_ ," Jessica sniffled to herself, only belatedly realizing she'd spoken out loud. Her toes, her fingers, her hair, her chubby face, her energetic burble— Jessica pressed her face against Grace's head. She stifled a laugh and a sob.

Jessica sank down on the bed, still with her back to Wyatt. "Is she hungry?" she asked.

"She ate when we got here."

So Jessica just gently rocked her, for a long time. Grace's eyelids started to get heavy. "Youuuuuu are getting veeeery sleeeeeeepy," Jessica whispered with a grin, unconcerned that she sounded like an idiot.

"Great," Wyatt muttered. "The plan was to put her to sleep on the way _home_. Now she's gonna wake up when I carry her out."

"You have to go already?" Jessica's arms tightened around Grace, who clearly didn't appreciate it.

"... no," Wyatt admitted after a minute. "You can hang on to her for a bit."

Jessica scooted back to lean against the wall and cradle Grace against her. Wyatt, perhaps feeling they were too close that way, sat gingerly at the end of the other bed. That meant he could see her face now, but Jessica just focused on Grace and didn't look up. Finally Grace fell asleep with a little grumbly sigh that stole Jessica's heart.

"She's not shy about what she wants," Wyatt whispered.

"Yeah? Whose fault is that?" The retort slipped out before Jessica thought about the wisdom of any kind of conversation with Wyatt beyond the minimum. Wyatt just gave her the barest ghost of a grin in return.

"You're not allowed to leave her alone with me, are you," she added, when Wyatt showed every sign of staying put.

Wyatt hesitated.

"It's okay." It wasn't. Knowing he thought she was capable of hurting their daughter was like lemon juice on a paper cut, and the only thing worse was thinking that she deserved it.

"I know how to look after her," Wyatt whispered. "I know when to feed her so she doesn't start up her banshee impression. She does a great one." He sounded wry. "And—"

Grace made a face. And a smell.

"... and that." Wyatt leaned forward and took Grace, hand brushing Jessica's in the process. "Hand me the diaper bag? You know how to do this?" he added.

Jessica had to shake her head. She couldn't even do that for her own daughter.

So Wyatt spread everything out on the other bed and changed Grace's diaper with an efficiency that indicated practice. Then he picked her up and bounced her a few times, smiling warm and wide in a way that made Jessica's heart turn over, until Grace burbled again. "Here."

Eagerly, Jessica took her back again. Wyatt did something with the diaper through the door. Possibly handed it to the guard, which was a nice mental image.

"Tell me about her, Wyatt," Jessica said quietly, holding Grace close again. "What is she like?"

He hesitated. "Well, y'know, she's like two months old."

She wondered if he'd be more willing to answer if someone else had asked. "You said she's not shy about what she wants and she has a great banshee impression. What else?"

"She likes to cuddle," he said after a minute. Reluctantly. "Likes her sleep. She's _real_ fond of eating."

"And she's been... healthy?"

When he didn't reply, she opened her eyes to see him nodding. "On schedule with her shots and everything."

Jessica closed her eyes again, and pressed her nose against Grace's head. She didn't know how long they had. She didn't know when she'd be allowed to see her daughter again. She focused on absorbing and memorizing everything she could, right now. The weight, the gentle baby breath against her collarbone, the smell of her hair.

"Why'd you leave, Jess?" Wyatt asked after a while.

That was not the gentle tone in which they'd been having a very cautious detente about their child. When she reluctantly opened her eyes, he was watching her with an intensity she remembered from when he'd been asking questions, putting together the pieces about Rittenhouse with startling speed.

"I wanted better for her," Jessica admitted.

"She was already out." Wyatt continued to watch her with that unavoidable intensity.

Jessica watched him right back for a minute. "You once told me a story about your mom," she said finally.

Wyatt winced.

"Dunno if it happened in your timeline," she added. "How she always filled up on vegetables, no matter what it was, and she told you it was because she just liked them better than meat."

Wyatt closed his eyes, face pinched. "Wasn't 'til after she died I got that she'd been saving the meat for me." He shook his head and opened his eyes. "But even back then I knew she was a terrible liar. So it was true about the vegetables."

"Sometimes when there's something unavoidable in the center of your world," Jessica said after a minute. "You build your whole world around it."

She wasn't sure he believed her. But that didn't trouble her. She had the satisfaction of knowing that for the first time in her adult like, she was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

It was heady and terrifying.

She dozed before Wyatt said, "Jessica."

She looked up.

"We have to go." He actually sounded a little regretful.

Jessica swallowed and nodded.

"I'm gonna see if she's hungry before we leave. Do you wanna, uh...?"

"Yes," she said immediately.

So Wyatt took Grace out to the kitchen and returned with a made-up bottle. He smiled down at Grace with an unguarded warmth that took Jessica's breath away, so it was a good thing he wasn't looking at _her_. He got Grace started with the bottle and carefully passed her to Jessica, showing how to hold her.

Grace drank the whole thing, and then the two of them had to go.

Jessica didn't say anything as Wyatt got ready to leave, because she wasn't sure she could keep her voice even. She didn't stop him until they were at the door: "Wyatt."

He turned.

"Keep her safe." In Jessica's attempt to keep her voice from breaking, it came out as a growl.

He stared at her, and gave her one solemn nod. Then they were gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also didn't expect that time I brushed with a quasi-cult to ever be relevant to a story, and yet, here we are.
> 
> I actually wrote a different version of Jessica's origin story first, that I just couldn't make mesh with canon by the time I got all the way through the series. I'll try to put that up on the blog I use for outtakes in the next few days.


	10. Iphigenia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: references to violent homophobia and misogyny, genocide, suicidal ideation; on-screen violence and killing

It was hard to focus on the war when he had his arm around the waist of the woman he desperately loved, with his nose in her hair.

She'd saved him, twice. And now she wanted to _marry_ him.

It was a little hard to believe.

Just— days, a few weeks ago, he'd been convinced he was about to die. He'd focused on making the most of his time with her. Now he couldn't understand how he'd gotten so _lucky_.

"You think too loudly," she slurred sleepily. She stroked her fingertips along his arm.

"... is this some psychic vision-related thing?"

She shook her head, her hair tickling his chest. "No, it's a having nerve endings thing."

"Didn't mean to wake you. Sorry." He kissed the top of her head.

"Mmm." She rolled over and smiled sleepily at him.

He was still learning what those three years of Chinatown had meant to her. He was still getting to know this more hardened, survivor Jiya. He knew that the impact would never truly go away, and he wasn't trying to change that.

But at the same time, she _looked_ so much happier than when she'd yanked him into that alley in 1888 and kissed the hell out of him.

It was a process. Rufus wasn't sure where they'd end up. But they were going there together, and just the fact that they had that chance kind of made him want to believe in miracles.

Kind of. You didn't need any supernatural explanation for six sigma events. You just needed a thorough understanding of the laws of probability.

Or, apparently, one incredibly badass girlfriend. _Fiancée._ Holy _shit_.

This, with her, wasn't the only thing he hadn't been sure he'd ever see again. He'd finally seen Mom and Kevin face-to-face after months apart, which had been... wonderful. He hated that they were cooped up in that compound in the mountains, but with Emma running the show now... yeah, better them safe there than anywhere else.

But if they had to stay there much longer, Kevin would have to drop out for the fall semester. Rufus definitely didn't want that. Aaaand now he _was_ thinking of the war.

Jiya leaned up and kissed him slowly, neatly shunting his train of thought onto another line. "Hi," he told her when they pulled apart. "Have I told you lately that I love you? Because I do. Also, you're amazing."

She looked at him thoughtfully. "I love you so much it scares me sometimes," she whispered.

There were never any guarantees, they both knew that. But right now they had even fewer than usual.

"But you're worth it," she added.

Aw. Now he felt like he had his own little nuclear reactor right in his heart. If this kept going, he might be risking a meltdown.

"... _but_ ," she added with a scowl.

He felt a little regretful, but not really surprised. He knew it was going to keep coming up. He understood better, now, after realizing that the stress of carrying the Lifeboat upgrade on her shoulders alone had affected her nearly as much as Chinatown.

"I can't believe you told Connor Voyage Home was my favorite," she said. "He made us watch it for my birthday."

Startled, Rufus snickered. Then he stopped snickering. "I missed your birthday. I'm sorry."

"To be fair, you had pretty much the best possible excuse."

Rufus kissed her shoulder. "There are no good excuses for that." He paused. "I guess to make it up to you, we'll just have to watch it again."

" _What?_ " She sat bolt upright. "No. We are _not_ —"

"How could I possibly deprive you of—"

She started to tickle him, scowling ferociously, and he was trying so hard not to wake anyone laughing that he forgot all about the one with the whales. And when he finally pinned her hands, she looked so beautiful, so radiant having succumbed to her own grin, that he _had_ to kiss the corner of her mouth, the edge of her jaw, that spot on her neck that made her squirm happily, the top of her breast...

Both of them definitely forgot about the one with the whales.

#

His mother had once told him about binary stars, two suns that orbited a common point between them.

He and Lucy felt like that lately.

He hadn't tried to kiss her again. He hadn't considered it. It was up to her, and of _course_ he wanted her. But more fundamentally, he wanted it to be, knew it had to be, her choice.

He also knew she wasn't disinterested. But the Beatles notwithstanding, love was not, in fact, all you needed. Definitely not during a war. Maybe not ever.

He watched her get ready for bed, and knew she had something on her mind. From the way she glanced at him, it might well relate to the two of them.

She'd gotten easier for him to read, but that had never been particularly difficult. The first time he'd seen her after that disastrous ambush...

One look at her, standing outside his cell, and he'd known she wasn't all right. This was not the flesh-and-blood Lucy who'd looked on in horror as the agents dragged him away. In that moment, motionless and pale in the corridor, she'd reminded him of nothing so much as a new-forged, sharp-honed sword.

But how did you turn steel into a blade? You heated it until it was malleable and beat the hell out of it.

He'd still been too angry with her then for the full import to sink in. But... later. When his temper had lost what he had to admit was the desperate fury of a caged beast, which was exactly how they'd treated him.

At first he'd tried to call his feeling contempt: _this is where naiveté gets you, Lucy_.

Then... guilt, which had infuriated him. She wasn't his responsibility, or his damned problem. She'd _betrayed_ him, through foolishness if not intent. He'd lost his chance to save his girls and they'd locked him up like a damn _animal_.

He'd taken that feeling out on her, the last person he should've done that to, because— it was too much. And he absolutely refused to be worried about her, she'd made all her choices freely, it wasn't his problem—

But she'd looked so _bad_.

— and he absolutely had not wanted to care. So he'd lashed out.

Once he'd peeled away the anger he'd found resentment, for making him think about this at all. Beneath that he'd found what he this time could not deny was guilt. She'd dragged him into this, but she didn't know that yet, and... this change in her, he'd catalyzed it.

About five layers below that, like the pea at the bottom of the proverbial pile, he'd found worry.

After they got him out, he'd tried to keep her in metaphorical sight. With her team she was much closer to the Lucy he remembered, but he also remembered that moment in prison. And he'd known, somehow, that none of the rest of them had seen her like that. Why she'd chosen to take down the baffles and barriers of misdirection with him alone, he didn't know. Perhaps because the war had broken both of them. But he'd seen, and to dismiss that would be irresponsible. Cruel. Like walking away from a toddler playing next to a swimming pool.

Besides, he knew what fighting this war alone had done to São Paulo Lucy. If the journal was accurate, he'd saved this Lucy once already, by keeping her from becoming Rittenhouse's historian. But that didn't absolve him.

He'd expected this Lucy to break at some point. And she had— the alley in Chinatown, those nights in Florida, that night just recently after they'd kissed. What had surprised him, at first, had been her capacity for just... continuing on afterwards.

And somewhere along the way...

"You still deserve your family back," she said quietly.

This was another thing for which he loved her so dearly, even when it sometimes exasperated him: her kindness and generosity of spirit that had somehow withstood this brutal war. You had to have fucked up badly indeed for Lucy Preston not to want the best for you.

This subject was not an easy thing for him to argue about. But if it helped her feel she stood on more stable ground, he would. "They deserve to come back," he corrected her. As for the rest... "Lucy, look." He took his shirt off.

She looked politely away.

"No," he told her. " _Look_."

She turned back, startled. As she studied his bare torso, a faint flush spread across her cheeks. And knowing that she didn't find his body totally repulsive, scarred and battered as it was—

That would _completely_ derail him if he let it. So he couldn't.

"Chechnya." He touched the faint scar under his clavicle. "Mogadishu." The one by his right hip. "Sarajevo." The two on the left side of his rib cage, an inch above his elbow. "Lorena knew my scars, Lucy," he told her quietly. "Over the years, I... told her all the stories." It hadn't been easy. "Suppose she does come back. And she wants _me_ back, whatever I've been doing these years in her timeline. How would that work, exactly, Lucy? What would I tell her?"

He touched the scar on the right side of his neck, his souvenir from their first meeting. "What would I tell her?" he repeated. "A man shot me because I was hiding behind an unarmed woman? And _here?_ " The pale line on the outside of his left shoulder, from 1780. "That I was trying to kill a _child?_ " He held Lucy's gaze until he tugged his shirt back on. "Trust me, Lucy. She would notice. Everything."

All the scars: physical, and... not.

"And how would I explain? Say I can't tell her about any of it? It would horrify her to know the truth, and it would tear us apart to keep it a secret. And I wouldn't want it to end like that." He shook his head. "Rittenhouse killed them. But _I_ was the one who made it so we could never again be together."

If Lorena did come back— and, God, knowing it was impossible did not slake his longing for her to _live_ , as she deserved— Lucy wouldn't be the one standing in his way. He himself would.

"I couldn't go back and pretend to be the man she knew any more than you could pretend to be the woman you were before I stormed Mason Industries," he added.

He saw, at last, understanding dawn in Lucy's expression.

"I'm sorry, Garcia," she said softly.

"I made my choices." His voice came out rougher than he intended.

"I know." She refused to let him deflect her sympathy— no, _empathy_. "But you chose them from an set of equally terrible alternatives."

He looked down, no longer able to withstand the compassion in her expression. "Lucy—"

When the jump alarm went off, he felt, for once, relieved.

"Friday, November 19 th , 1920, Greenwich Village," Mason reported, when the six of them had gathered in the Lifeboat bay. Agent Christopher was away overseeing efforts to lure Emma into the Reno trap.

"Lucy?" Rufus asked.

Lucy shook her head, which no longer surprised them as it once had.

"Jessica told Agent Christopher that Emma had been looking at a passenger list from the Imperator, which sailed that month from New York City," Wyatt said.

They all looked at him, possibly remembering the _last_ time they'd taken Wyatt's word about Jessica.

Wyatt's mouth tightened. "Check the recording."

"The Imperator left the next day," Lucy said, scanning something quickly. "Let's look at the manifest..."

Rufus read over Lucy's shoulder. "Go back. There. Queen Bess."

Lucy looked up at him. "Queen Elizabeth wasn't born yet and the Queen Mother was still the Duchess of York."

"No, I mean, Bessie Coleman."

Lucy, taken aback, appeared to consider this.

"Cliff's notes for the rest of us?" Wyatt asked after a minute.

"Bessie Coleman was a pilot," Rufus said.

"The first African American woman to have a pilot's license, right?" Lucy asked.

Rufus nodded. "And the first American ever to have an international pilot's license. Two years before Amelia Earhart."

"So what's Rittenhouse want with her?" Wyatt asked.

Lucy shook her head. "I don't know—"

"She inspired a lot of people." Rufus came alive with an enthusiasm Garcia had never seen before. "She came from basically nothing to became a famous stunt pilot. A pioneer. She refused to perform for segregated audiences, or play demeaning roles in movies. She said, and I quote, 'I thought it my duty to risk my life to learn aviation,' just because there were no Black pilots at the time."

Pause.

"... what? She's from Chicago."

Wyatt made a dark noise. "Jessica did also say Emma was planning a series of attacks on civil rights figures. Coordinated jumps, each building off the last. Maybe this is the start. She's inspirational? Maybe, without Bessie Coleman, we wouldn't get, um... the Tuskegee Airmen at the time that we did. Maybe—"

"We don't get the Tuskegee Airmen, the military integrates later," Lucy said, as Wyatt nodded agreement. "No Tuskegee Airmen, no Freeman Field mutiny, and one less civil rights case for Thurgood Marshall. Little things that we don't see coming until it's too late. Maybe this is her new strategy."

"Okay," Garcia said. "So what's Bessie doing in Paris?"

"No American flying schools would teach a Black woman," Rufus said. "So she learned French and went to France to enroll there."

"It makes sense that Emma would attack now," Lucy added. "In Chicago she lived with her brothers, and there were a lot of people around who knew her. In New York City she's all alone."

Wyatt glanced at the rest of them. "Then let's go."

They were delayed briefly by Mason pointing out that though the Lifeboat _could_ carry five passengers, it wasn't a comfortable fit, and they probably shouldn't take both their pilots on the same mission. The rest of them got to sit through Rufus and Jiya arguing about which one of them would go; Rufus won, which left Jiya tight-lipped.

Which, yes, Garcia understood, they'd been through something very terrible, etc, etc. He was even happy for them. But couldn't they sort this out without involving the rest of them?

An hour later it was behind them and they were walking the streets of 1920 Greenwich Village, appropriately dressed. Garcia hid a smile at Lucy looking around wide-eyed at this haunt of artists and rebels. Watching her enjoy history never got old.

"So, what are we expecting?" Wyatt also looked around, appropriately on guard. "Where do we find Bessie?"

"Her ship leaves tomorrow, so she's probably in a boarding house for the night," Lucy said. "The Village is cheap and close to the Chelsea piers. Scandalized immigrants lived side-by-side with starving artists."

"How many boarding houses do we have to search?"

"Well, if segregation's a thing in Greenwich Village—" Rufus stepped out of the way of a white woman who glared at him. "Yep. So, probably, not that many."

They stopped someone dressed as if he'd just left rehearsal and got the addresses of three boarding houses. "Okay," Lucy said. "We—"

"— ... uh, Lucy?"

She'd nearly done a one-eighty trying to keep a tall blond man in her sight.

"Is he Rittenhouse?" Wyatt hissed.

"What? No! I'm almost positive that was Max Eastman." Lucy looked stunned.

"Who?"

"He edited some of the most influential radical and socialist magazines," Lucy said. "He published people like Dorothy Day and Helen Keller. What if Emma's not here for Bessie after all?"

"Could be both," Rufus pointed out. "The Mothership holds six. They could've split up."

"Thanks for that, Rufus," Wyatt muttered.

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger."

"Rufus, you and Wyatt check out these boarding houses," Lucy decided. "Find Bessie and keep her safe. Garcia and I will see if we can figure out what else Emma's up to."

"Do you have a plan?" Garcia asked once they'd split up.

"The Golden Swan was a local watering hole and nexus for the Village. If there's anyone there actually sober enough to help us, they can tell us if anyone's been asking strange questions about the local activists lately."

"Besides us, you mean?"

She looked back at him.

"What?"

"I missed having you on the missions," she admitted.

She—

"Delighted to be of service, Lucy," he said drily, but he didn't think the look on his face was fooling her.

The Golden Swan was a rough, smoky pub that occupied the corner of the block. A man tried to insist Lucy use the side entrance until Garcia stepped up behind her and stared the speaker down. When the man had gone, Garcia looked around. "See anything?"

To his mind, it looked like any other run-down bar, but Dr. Preston was the expert.

And the expert was staring at a woman alone at the bar. She was tiny and striking, with a delicate face and bobbed red hair. By the looks of her, she'd been drinking for a while.

"Well." Lucy's voice sounded strange. "She might be able to help." She approached the woman. "Excuse me... Vincent?"

#

Edna St. Vincent Millay would become a household name because of her poetry, for which she was already justly famous. But right now, here in the Village, she was _also_ famous for her lovers. Which meant she knew basically everyone.

And from the way she kept looking at Garcia, Lucy was now willing to believe some of those _higher_ numbers that she'd previously rejected as absurd.

Lucy wasn't _jealous_. Of course not. She was an adult with a job to do.

"No, hasn't been anyone sniffing around here," Edna said after Lucy had bought her a drink. Prohibition had not stopped the Golden Swan from serving its patrons, though Lucy wouldn't want to drink what was in that glass herself. "Why do you ask?" She gave them a shrewd look.

"We're, uh, activists from Chicago," Lucy said. "We're worried that—"

She looked up, saw a familiar face, and bolted for the side door, knocking her chair over in the process.

She heard shouts behind her, but all she listened for were Garcia's footsteps behind her. She lunged for the door—

He grabbed her shoulder, pulling her to a hard stop. "Wait. Remember Chinatown." He pushed the door open. When no one fired, he slipped through. He paused, then held it open for her.

Lucy burst through impatiently and looked around— She might have lost him because of Garcia's caution—

There.

"It's the soldier from Memphis," she told Garcia, over her shoulder, before she took off again.

"I know!"

Maybe one day Lucy would make a list of all the restrictive period garb in which she'd had to run. As decades went, the clothes of the nineteen teens weren't too bad, and she was wearing sensible boots.

But still.

She careened around the corner and dropped to the ground as bullets flew high, lodging in the wall across the street. Garcia followed her and returned fire. "Lucy!"

"Fine," she assured him. He helped her scramble up. "Which way?"

"Left." And the chase continued.

Garcia exchanged fire with the soldier again before they chased him into a maze of tenement back alleys. "Keep going this way," Garcia ordered, and split off. She heard him climbing, and then his footsteps disappeared.

Lucy kept on the soldier's tracks— he was a little slower than the average man, which—

She skidded around a corner and nearly ran into him, retreating before Garcia. She darted backwards so he couldn't grab her as a hostage. He turned sideways— aimed back at Garcia— then at her, his unarmed opponent.

His gun was trained on her, his mouth tight. But he hadn't shot yet. "Tom," she said.

He twitched, staring at her in disbelief.

"That's your name, right?" she said. "Tom Bolick? From Pepys, Wisconsin."

"What do you want from me," he growled.

Lucy kept her hands open and spread. "I found the letter you wrote to your brother after you enlisted," she said gently. "It's, um, it's in an archive. You were trying to explain to him, to your whole family, why you weren't happy to stay back in Wisconsin and clear some land for yourself and farm like everyone else."

His hand was shaking.

"You told him you just 'felt you had to go a-wanderin,'" she continued softly. "You told him you wanted to see the country, 'this great patriotic experiment.' That's why you went with Emma, wasn't it? You weren't afraid to die in 1880. You wanted to see 2017."

"What," he repeated, " _do_ . _You_ . _Want_ . _From_ . _Me_."

"I want you to believe me when I say you don't have to do this." In her peripheral vision she could see Garcia holding him at gunpoint, and just had to trust that Garcia would trust _her_ method this time. But she saved her attention for Tom. "You're not a bad man, Tom. When your unit captured two Ponca warriors and some of the men wanted to torture them, you sat up all night with a rifle to guard them, though you were outnumbered. And when that wasn't enough, you talked them out of it." She shook her head. "You don't have to fight for Emma. None of you do. You can _walk away_ . You can walk away here, or in 2017. We can _take_ you back to 2017."

Tom was silent, his eyes huge.

"You said in 1892 that it wasn't exactly a selfless suggestion from me," Lucy continued. "But Garcia could've already shot you, Tom. We don't _want_ to kill you. I know Emma. I know— I _know_ —" Lucy's voice cracked. "How she can manipulate people and things. She knows just like I do that you're an honorable man and she's taking advantage of the fact that you feel indebted to her. You're not a bad man. But she is asking you to do bad things."

Slowly, Tom lowered his gun, his hand shaking.

Lucy glanced past him to Garcia, and nodded.

Garcia's mouth tightened. He stared back at her for a moment before lowering his own gun.

Tom lunged forward and shoved Lucy behind him. She hit the ground hard and watched, stunned, as his feet disappeared around the corner. For the second time, Garcia helped her up, this time with a _very_ pointed look.

"He was shot in the leg in 1876," Lucy managed, as Garcia hauled her to her feet. "'s why he's slow. We can still catch him—"

"And this time are you gonna let me kill him? He's _Rittenhouse_ , Lucy, he's not gonna be persuaded with a hug and a teddy bear!"

Lucy just shook her head, gathered her skirts, and started running again. She heard footsteps ahead, he couldn't be far—

She skidded to a stop right before colliding with Wyatt.

"The soldier— from Memphis—" he said.

"I know."

"Lucy just had a nice heart-to-heart with him in the alley," Garcia added sardonically, coming up behind her.

Wyatt looked at her. "And you let him get away?" He glanced past her. "And _you_ let him get away? I can't believe you."

"Hey. Do _you_ want to kill a bunch of people Emma manipulated into fighting for her? If we can help it?"

"They made their choices," Wyatt said. "This guy's a soldier, he knows what's what."

Lucy just shook her head. "What about Bessie?"

"We checked one boarding house before we saw that guy," Wyatt said. "He just went in the direction of one of the others."

"Then we have to get there first."

They didn't.

"Yeah, this guy really seems like the warm fuzzy type who's deeply conflicted about serving Rittenhouse," Wyatt snapped as he dropped back into cover to reload. Rufus and Garcia had gone around the back to try to get Bessie out; Wyatt was trying to keep Rittenhouse busy in the meantime. And, silencers or not, the police would be there any minute.

Wyatt frowned. "They've stopped shooting." He sounded grim. "They might have people inside who have—"

Lucy looked up, and discovered the likely reason why. "Wyatt!"

"Hello, Dr. Preston," the big man said pleasantly, holding her at gunpoint. "We thought we'd be seeing you here."

 _Doctor_ Preston. This had to be a modern-day agent. If Emma had many of them left, she wouldn't be raiding other centuries. Which meant he was a precious commodity. Him being here for _her_ meant—

Was this all—

The man flinched. Wyatt snapped his gun up and shot him twice.

He tumbled to the ground. Behind him, Edna had a rock in her hand. Lucy saw another rock behind the dead man.

"He's dead." Edna's voice shook. "You _shot_ him."

"Yeah, well, he was gonna shoot us."

"What are you doing here?" Lucy broke in.

"I followed you from the bar. You seemed like you were up to something interesting."

"Okay," Lucy said. "First, thanks for saving our lives. Second, go home. It's not safe."

Footsteps. Wyatt turned, but it was Rufus and Bessie, Garcia bringing up the rear. Bessie's eyes were wide, but she wasn't panicking. Of course not. In a few years, danger was going to be her stock and trade.

"We need to hide until Bessie's ship leaves," Garcia said. "They'll be checking the boarding houses—"

"Come with me," Edna said.

#

_We were very merry, we were very tired_ , Lucy thought, perched on the daybed in Edna's little West Twelfth street apartment.

One look at Edna's pantry and Wyatt had gone out for food, plus a small bag of coal, so the five of them didn't eat their hostess out of house and home. Lucy knew Edna was relatively financially successful right now, but _relative_ for a poet wasn't... much.

So they'd sat where they could, Bessie and Edna on Edna's daybed, Rufus and Lucy in chairs, Wyatt on Edna's steamer trunk, Garcia leaning against the windowsill, and had one of the strangest, best picnics Lucy had ever experienced. Now Garcia was taking first watch against Rittenhouse; the rest of them had gathered near the stove for its warmth. Even with six bodies, a radiator, _and_ a stove, the apartment was cold.

Wyatt had discovered Bessie had been born in Texas... and Lucy wouldn't have expected the experiences of a Black and Cherokee woman born in 1892, and a white man born in 1984, to have much in common, but Bessie, Wyatt, and Rufus all seemed to be having a great time swapping memories of home.

Edna sat beside Lucy on the daybed, quite close, and put a glass of bootleg gin in her hand. Lucy smiled her thanks.

Edna looked exhausted. She'd published many of her most famous poems that year, but she was also sick, and unhappy. These last two, Lucy could tell without historical knowledge.

"I know you must get this all the time, but I really admire your work," Lucy couldn't help saying after a few minutes. She knew she sounded like just another adoring fan, but, come on. This was _literally_ her only opportunity, ever.

"Thank you," Edna said politely.

"When I disc— when I first read "Grown-Up," I thought— yes. Now I see myself represented in the American poetic conscious."

Edna laughed, a frankly enchanting, throaty sound very different from her polite smile. "Most people say "Renascence" or "First Fig.""

Those were amazing, too, of course. But Lucy had been a first-year grad student, floundering, frustrated, and questioning her choices, when she'd discovered that wry pair of couplets reflecting on expectation versus reality.

And "Passer Mortuus Est"— Lucy glanced at Wyatt, then away. But Edna hadn't written that one yet.

Lucy suddenly felt very lucky. She and Wyatt weren't lovers any more. But they were still friends, and she still loved him.

Edna saw. "I can't figure out which of those men you're with," she said, sipping her own gin. Rufus, Wyatt and Bessie were making enough noise that Lucy felt only mildly mortified. "At first I thought it was Mr. Flynn, but the way Mr. Logan looks at you..."

Lucy was proud of herself for swallowing her gin without choking. She decided which horn of this dilemma to impale herself on. Edna was not shy when she wanted someone, nor was she known for her kindness to her lovers. And Lucy had seen how she'd watched both Garcia and Wyatt. Better if she thought... "Both. All three of them, actually."

Edna's eyebrows went up. "At _once?_ "

Lucy nodded.

The woman who was, at this point in her life, engaged in a mere on-again, off-again ménage à trois, silently saluted Lucy with her glass.

Rufus looked up, his danger sense tingling. Lucy gave him a bright smile.

"There's something about you I can't understand," Edna said, after a minute, studying Lucy closely. "You're not from nearby, are you?"

That was the second time in eighteen months a remarkable New York City woman had said this to her. Well, if you counted twenty-first century time it was only—

Lucy gave up on that time travel headache. "No," she said simply.

"You're used to have a good deal of freedom, aren't you?"

"Yes." Compared to a woman in 1920, definitely.

"It's attractive," Edna told her frankly.

"Thank you."

Bessie's voice came through: "... going to Ecole d'Aviation des Freres Caudron."

Edna straightened up. "You're going to France?" They'd been trying to get off the street as fast as possible, and Bessie had just been introduced as Miss Bessie Coleman who was leaving for Europe in the morning.

"Yes." Bessie got a glint in her eye: "There's no _American_ school that'll teach a colored woman to fly."

"You're going to France to become a _pilot_?"

"Yes." Bessie tilted her chin up. "And then I'm going to come back and start a school to teach other Black pilots."

Edna slid to the floor without ceremony, the look of exhaustion leaving her demeanor. "How in the world did you decide to do that?"

Bessie tilted her head a little. "I always wanted to make something of myself," she said. "Never knew what it was going to be. Tried college, didn't have the money to finish. But my brothers came back from the war and they told me about the French lady pilots. They said a Black woman could never be up there. That settled it."

Edna seemed almost at a loss for words, which were, after all, her profession. "But it's dangerous."

"Yes," Bessie agreed easily. "But I have the money. Why shouldn't I do it?"

"What do you do now?"

"I'm a manicurist."

"Have you ever been behind the controls before?"

"Never."

Rufus was watching Bessie with something like adoring awe. This job did have its moments _._

Edna looked almost as impressed. "I'm going to Paris myself soon," she said after a moment. "Perhaps we'll meet there."

"Maybe we will," Bessie agreed.

Lucy suppressed a smile. Edna would cross the Atlantic in less than two months, but at this point in the original timeline, she was still making up her mind.

"You know, uh," Wyatt said. "Rufus, here, is a pilot too."

Rufus looked so alarmed Lucy was relieved to be with two soldiers who probably knew CPR, in case his heart spontaneously stopped. "I, uh. Heh heh." He chuckled nervously.

"You are?" Bessie's eyebrows went up.

"Um. Sort. Of?"

She leaned in. "What kind of plane do you fly?"

"I don't... fly planes."

"Oh, you're an airship pilot?"

"... something like that."

"I think what you're doing is amazing," Lucy told Bessie, to cover the awkward moment. "I would be way, way too frightened to even _dream_ of it."

Bessie gave Lucy a wonderful dimpled smile. "Thank you."

Edna offered Lucy and Bessie her bed, explaining that she worked at odd hours and she'd be sitting up a while with a manuscript. Rufus and Wyatt stretched out by the stove. Garcia took one of the chairs to the window.

Lucy dozed for a while. When she woke, she couldn't fall asleep again, whether because of the scratching of Edna's pen, the knocking of the radiator, or just too much on her mind.

Finally she wrapped a blanket around herself and got up. Edna had stepped out— for the bathroom at the end of the hall, presumably— and Wyatt had replaced Garcia by the window. She joined him.

"Anything?" she asked quietly, mindful of the three sleeping people. But the radiator covered their voices.

Two. Garcia glanced at them from under barely-open eyelids, then closed his eyes again.

"Not unless Rittenhouse is organizing impromptu street theater, or... whatever that was with all the women in scarves."

Lucy smiled.

"Hey, Lucy?" Wyatt murmured.

"Mmm."

"Why does Edna's typewriter say 'Red Cross' on the side?"

"She, uh. One of her lovers... got that for her."

"And by 'got' you mean 'stole.'"

"Well, _he_ thought she'd give it back."

Wyatt was quiet for a while. "She looks sick," he said softly.

"She is. And she recently lost a lot of blood in a botched abortion, like way too many women in this time period. And she's... lovesick."

"Oh? Who is he? He?"

"He. Arthur Ficke. They, uh." Lucy rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly. "They had one night together when he was married and then he shipped out," she blurted. "And now he's avoiding her."

Wyatt made a throat-clearing noise. "Typical tragedy, huh?" He flexed his hands.

Lucy shook her head. "Not really. I mean, now it is, but they stayed good friends later in life, visited each other, collaborated together, took naked pictures of each other's spouses..."

"Normal poet things," Wyatt said.

"Pretty much."

They were quiet a moment. Edna returned, glanced at them, gave Lucy a bit of a smirk, and started writing again.

"So," Wyatt said. "That soldier."

Lucy heard the subtext. "If there's anything we know about Rittenhouse, it's that they are very, _very_ good at getting people to work for them. Do you remember how we _got_ here? Jessica deciding to defect after _twenty-five years?_ Without her intel, we'd be looking in the wrong place until it was too late." Bessie Coleman wasn't the first target that came to mind in 1920 Greenwich Village.

"Yeah, he really seemed misunderstood and victimized when he was _shooting_ at us."

"Trust me, Wyatt," Lucy said quietly. "I know how Rittenhouse recruits."

They stared at each other for a long moment. "I know," he finally murmured. "I always trust you."

Garcia cracked one eye open and glanced at them.

"I think we're disturbing Garcia's beauty sleep," Lucy whispered.

"Mmm, he does need a lot of it."

"Projection's not just a function of your TV, Wyatt," Garcia muttered.

"You're both very pretty, now be quiet," Lucy said firmly.

Garcia snorted, but subsided. Edna gave Lucy another significant glance.

"Do you want me to watch?" Lucy added.

Wyatt shook his head. "Go rest."

Bessie had spread out across the daybed. Lucy didn't want to disturb her, and besides, she'd be sleeping in a narrow steamship berth for the next six nights. So Lucy begged another blanket from Edna, spread it on the floor, and curled up against Garcia's back.

She woke to a quiet conversation between Wyatt and Rufus: "It's, uh, good to have you back on the missions," Wyatt was saying.

"Don't get all mushy on me, princess."

" _What?_ "

"Tell me you've seen _that_ one or we're staging an intervention."

She opened her eyes to see Wyatt look at Rufus. "Could you maybe talk a little less obviously about 21 st  century pop culture when we're a hundred years out of time?" Wyatt hissed.

"Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, but I take your point."

Lucy smiled.

They ate leftover sandwiches for breakfast. Edna looked very tired, but insisted on helping them escort Bessie to the ship. "This is Greenwich Village, darling," she said. "I'm used to all-night parties."

Having failed to kill Bessie the night before, Rittenhouse would probably try to intercept her at the ship. They took the back way to the docks, Wyatt going ahead, Garcia bringing up the rear. No one was surprised to find two men hanging around the land end of the dock.

"I'll handle this," Lucy decided. She looked around until she spotted a pair of police officers, posted near the docks for the peace of mind of the wealthy passengers boarding the steamers.

"I'll go—" Wyatt began.

"I'll be more effective."

"... be careful."

She nodded. She knew they would cover her; Garcia already had his gun out and his back against the alley wall.

"Excuse me, officer?" Lucy summoned her best outraged middle-class white woman demeanor as the man politely doffed his cap. "Those two men by the base of that dock are asking every passenger who's embarking if they want to buy some 'white lightning' for the voyage!"

"... oh?"

"It's an outrage!"

The two officers exchanged looks. New York City police had not been famous for their enthusiasm in enforcing Prohibition.

"An _outrage_ ," Lucy said firmly.

"Yes, ma'am," the closer officer sighed. "We'll ask them to move along."

While the officer was busy with the two men— they appeared to be earnestly arguing that, no, they would _never_ — Rufus and Wyatt hurried across the street with Bessie. Lucy stood guard at the edge of the dock, watching for anyone who looked suspicious. Besides them. Garcia was covering everyone from the protection of the alley.

"... plane you can't trust," Rufus was saying, as they passed her.

Bessie reached the top of the gangplank and went below deck right away. The four of them, and Edna, watched the ship from the concealment of the alley. The two Rittenhouse agents convinced the police officer and kept watching, but Bessie was safely out of sight.

They appeared to realize they'd been duped. One of them checked something in his jacket pocket and hurried up the gangplank. He slipped onboard behind a party of several women with big hats and bigger trunks—

Garcia started forward. Lucy grabbed his wrist. "Wait."

An enormous porter intercepted the Rittenhouse agent and bodily marched him back down the gangplank. From his gestures, he was promising that next time the man tried, he'd exit the ship straight into the river.

"They're strict about stowaways," Lucy said with satisfaction.

It took time to load a ship this big. The Rittenhouse agent had time to try again... and the porter had time to make good on his threat.

They watched with satisfaction as he struggled to shore. "Hey, Lucy?" Wyatt asked.

"Mmm?"

"Is the Hudson as polluted now as it's gonna, um..." He glanced sideways.

"It doesn't have PCBs yet. But it's still pretty bad."

"Couldn't have happened to a more deserving man," Rufus said.

"What's a PCB?" Edna asked.

The Rittenhouse agents tried to find a boat who would take them out, but most of the captains took one look at the sodden man and decided they didn't want to get involved. Finally, the massive ship's horn blew, and the _Imperator_ slowly steamed into the river.

They watched until the ship was out of sight.

"Well," Rufus said. "Let's, uh, go see what our favorite redhead is up to. Uh, second favorite," he added, glancing at Edna.

Lucy grimaced. They were prepared for Emma to be making multiple jumps, like she had when she went after William Still, Horace Greeley, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Connor had added a small auxiliary battery, but on their next stop, they might have to break out the solar charger.

"You're leaving?" Edna looked from one of them to the other. "You were just here to get Miss Coleman on the ship?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so," Lucy said. "Thank you so much for helping us, for saving us from that guy last night and giving us a place to stay."

"It was my pleasure." Edna shook hands with Rufus, with Wyatt, and with Garcia. "Gentlemen."

Lucy held out her hand. Instead, Edna kissed her.

Lucy had worked with Europeans. She'd kissed and been kissed by plenty of people as a polite social gesture. _This?_

This was Edna's hand on the back of Lucy's head, her head tilted so their noses didn't bump, her lips firm against Lucy's own and her body pressed up against Lucy.

Lucy's brain... stopped... braining.

Edna stepped back, maybe aware that Lucy wasn't responding, or... "I've wanted to do that since five minutes after you sat down next to me in the Hell Hole," she admitted. "Well. Goodbye."

Lucy's brain caught up with her. _Edna St. Vincent Millay_ had just _kissed her_ and she'd _stood there like a lump._ "Wait. Edna, wait!" She took a stepped forward, slid her hand through Edna's own hair, and pressed her mouth to Edna's.

Edna breathed in sharply and made a soft, pleased noise. She tasted of cigarettes and gin. She put her hands on Lucy's hips, then around Lucy's neck, pulling them flush against each other. They kissed, and kissed, slow and thorough and...

Finally Edna stepped back. Lucy's blood rushed in her ears, and other places. "Well." Edna smiled slightly, but her voice wasn't quite steady. "I believe I'll remember you, Lucy Preston."

Lucy knew how much that meant, coming from her.

Edna walked away. But she looked over her shoulder twice as she went.

Lucy turned around. Rufus's mouth was hanging open. Wyatt's eyebrows had apparently gotten jealous of the Space Needle's altitude. The only expression on Garcia's face was the tiniest hint of depth at the corners of his mouth.

Lucy cleared her throat and made several other _moving on getting down to business_ noises before she actually managed to say, "Back to the Lifeboat?"

Rufus sputtered, then snapped his mouth shut. "Lifeboat. Emma. Things. Yes."

But the Mothership was back in the present when they arrived.

"We didn't see Emma," Lucy said. "Maybe she is still hurt, maybe she needed to go back to the present."

"Or, maybe Jessica..." Wyatt trailed off, his mouth twisting.

"She helped us find Bessie, didn't she?"

When they climbed out of the Lifeboat in 2017, the Mothership was still in the present. Wyatt immediately grabbed his phone, checking for the nightly report from the agents guarding Grace and Jessica's family. There was no normal cell phone reception up there; the only contact with the outside world had to go through Denise's people. Lucky for Wyatt, the agent in charge was a soft touch. He got pictures almost every night.

Rufus shouted. "Lucy! Come look at this!"

"What is it?" She hurried over, alarmed, until she saw he was grinning ear-to-ear and practically dancing.

He showed her a picture on Wikipedia of a very old woman shaking hands with LBJ. "So historically Bessie fell to her death in 1926 when her plane stalled. I told her to be really careful about never riding in a plane she wasn't sure of, and about wearing her parachute." He was talking so fast Lucy had trouble understanding him. "She didn't make that test flight on April 30 th ! She went on to found her school for black aviators and like four of her students served with distinction in World War II and this is LBJ awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom!"

Lucy threw her arms around him, nearly dislodging the tablet. "That's amazing. _You're_ amazing."

He pulled away, and scratched at his head, looking adorably abashed and pleased. "Well."

"The only thing I can find that doesn't directly relate to Bessie Coleman is that Edna St. Vincent Millay had one fewer poem in your old timeline," Connor said behind them. "'Lady, Unbowed—'"

Lucy whirled and snatched _his_ tablet away. "Give me that." She was reading that _in private_.

She'd thought Garcia would be in the shower, but he was in their bedroom already. "Oh—" She started to back out.

"I'll—" He started for the door.

"No it's fine." She sat hurriedly down on the bed and read the poem.

Then she read it again.

And again.

"... Lucy?" Garcia prompted after a long moment.

She handed him the tablet.

His frown vanished as he read it. He, too, read it more than once. Then he handed it back. "She was, uh, perceptive."

Lucy read it again, already well on her way to memorizing it. Just. _Oh my God_.

Then she looked up fast. "You're not— upset, are you? About..." Because they hadn't— they weren't technically— but—

"What? No." He looked incredulous and horrified. "Did you _want_ me to be?"

"No!"

He relaxed.

Lucy just— needed some space right now, free of _all_ her teammates. Even Garcia. She grabbed her clothes and hurried into the shower.

#

"Hey," Jiya said that night as the six of them ate a quiet dinner. "We should watch Weapon of Choice."

"You still haven't seen it?" Connor asked.

"What's Weapon of Choice?" Garcia asked.

Jiya's eyes widened. "He doesn't know?"

"Obviously I don't. Know _what?_ "

"That's it. We're watching it."

They repurposed the biggest Lifeboat monitor as a TV. Rufus rerouted its normal display to his laptop and set an alarm for if anything changed. They dragged the couch around; Rufus and Jiya took the middle, with Connor and Wyatt flanking them on each side. Lucy perched on the couch's arm beside Connor. Garcia pulled up a chair.

The movie started. Lucy glanced at Garcia, and tilted her head sideways. He gave her a blank look. She tugged at the edge of his chair. It didn't move, of course. But he got the message and scooted closer, right up against the couch.

Casually, she leaned her head against his shoulder.

He took a slow breath in. If they'd been alone she thought he would've put his arm around her. The lights were off and no one would've noticed. But in front of the others— well. Figuring out what they were was hard enough. Doing it in public would be worse.

"Hey," Rufus said when his character appeared. "I'm actually black."

"Oh, it was a big deal when it came out," Connor said. "This was 1955. It was the year after your _Brown v. Board of Education_. Seeing a brilliant, brave black man helping James Bond was... a cultural moment."

"And I'm... dressed in something no reasonable CIA agent would ever wear," Lucy said, less enthusiastically.

"And Wyatt's _married?_ " Jiya asked.

Wyatt didn't say anything.

"Have you seen this before?" Jiya added.

"Mm-hmm."

"You wore your ring on that trip?"

"In our timeline—" Rufus reminded her.

"Oh. Right."

"Just keep watching." Wyatt sounded resigned.

"Hey, that was kind of close to how it actually happened." Lucy was impressed as she paid attention to the historical details. She was used to doing that; she was less used to it being her own history. Fleming had really—

"Oh. Oh God." She sat up straight. "That _definitely_ didn't happen." Her face flamed as Lucy and Bond's clothes started coming off.

"Wait, you also didn't wear a plunging gown down to your belly button?" Rufus added. "Come on, everyone knows that would've been totally appropriate for Nazi Germany." He turned to give her a sympathetic grin.

Lucy made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat, and put her head on Garcia's shoulder again.

"You want us to fast forward?" Jiya asked.

"Scene's about to cut," Wyatt said.

Why did— how many times—

Rufus shouted with delight when the movie accurately included him setting off the rocket to save Lucy. Jiya leaned up and kissed him.

There was a collective wince when Garcia's character died horribly. But Garcia didn't react at all.

"Wait," Lucy said toward the end of the movie. "So if Fleming used priest holes in this movie, does he not use them in Skyfall?"

"Skyfall wasn't based on a Fleming novel." Wyatt didn't take his eyes off the screen.

"They're still in there," Connor added. "It was considered a homage."

"I still can't believe Fleming," Lucy muttered when the credits rolled. "I'm not surprised. I'm just—"

"Pissed that he was such an enormous tosser?" Connor suggested.

"Yes. That."

"Guys, we can fix this," Jiya said.

"You're not taking the Lifeboat to—" Connor began, as Rufus also objected.

Jiya shook her head. "No, I mean, this is what fanfic is for. _Someone's_ written a fix-it."

"... what?" Lucy said.

Garcia went to bed, but the rest of them watched over Jiya's shoulder as she pulled up some kind of database and navigated to the page for Weapon of Choice. "Okay, so we filter out all the ones that ship Lucy/Bond..."

The result was depressingly small, but at least it wasn't zero. Lucy leaned in closer. "What's femmeslash February?"

"It's a month for stories about women loving women," Jiya said.

Rufus and Wyatt exchanged looks, then seemed to find random inoffensive objects in the room very, very interesting.

"Oh. Homoerotic content instead of heteroerotic." Lucy nodded. "You know, anthropologically speaking— Wait. What's that sentence? 'That dress oh my God that dress?'"

"That's a tag," Jiya said. "It's like— a descriptor. It— okay, this'll take some explaining. Lucy became kind of a feminist icon, and—"

"She did?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah, because she's a lot more competent than other Bond girls of the time, and she leaves Bond on her terms. He says they might see each other again, and she just turns him down. So, anyway, one day an interviewer asked Fleming why Lucy was so different than the usual Bond girl, and he admitted she was based on someone he'd known. And the interviewer asked if they'd, you know, had a relationship and he said no."

"... and then what?"

"Gloria Steinem tore him to _shreds_ ." Jiya pulled up a new page. "She wrote this scathing article in _Ms._ about how Fleming was using fiction as his wish fulfillment, and somewhere out there was this woman who'd had her life splashed up on the big screen, twisted to suit what Fleming wanted, and... It was this whole thing."

Lucy read quickly, eyebrows going up and up. This... this was _glorious_.

"For a while feminist scholars tried to find 'the real Lucy,'" Jiya added. "And they couldn't, of course, and it was this other whole thing. Like, how the real woman had been erased from history while the fictional interpretation through the male gaze lived on, and... yeah."

"Oh," Lucy said faintly, continuing the article, "my God."

"Right. So, because Lucy becomes famous, so does that dress. You know, the black one?"

"That I wear for all of two minutes in the movie?"

"Yep." Jiya navigated to a wiki page. "Here."

Lucy looked over her shoulder. "Is that a Halloween party?"

"Yup. 1971. Count the Lucys."

"... I count at least three." They all wore the black, plunging-neckline dress from the movie poster, but they'd all accessorized with various guns and knives.

"So, that's the dress."

"... oh."

"She also, um, became something of a queer icon," Jiya offered after a minute. "Starting in the 70s."

"Wait, what? But she doesn't—"

"But she turns Bond down at the end. And a lot of queer women just... found her very attractive."

Lucy digested all this. "And none of you thought to _tell me_ this?"

Rufus raised his hands. "Hey, I didn't know. This never happened in our timeline."

"Nope," Wyatt agreed.

Lucy turned to the other two.

"Sorry, I guess saving the world took up most of my attention." Jiya didn't sound too sorry.

"Your, ah, fictional sex life just didn't seem like appropriate conversational fodder," Connor said.

Lucy shook her head. "I will provisionally accept those explanations."

Edna St. Vincent Millay had written her a poem. Gloria Steinem had written an article defending Lucy's fictional alter ego.

Man, they did lead weird lives.

Garcia would be amused by all this. But when she entered their bedroom, he closed his book and stood up. "I'm, uh, gonna sleep on the couch."

"... what?"

He looked down at her. "I just spent an hour and twenty-seven minutes watching the time I collaborated with Nazis. Trust me, Lucy. I'm not sleeping near anyone else tonight."

... oh.

_You think I like helping these bastards? You think I sleep at night?_

"Then I'll take the couch. I'm shorter."

"No, Lucy—"

"You," she said, " _promised_ — that if you ever wanted me to leave, you would tell me." She stared up at him. _You promised not to lie to me._

His face softened. "I know. But I don't want you to leave. You've done your couch time."

She could tell him she wanted him to stay because she'd sleep better that way. He probably would... but it wouldn't be what _he_ needed.

_You make me want to make you stop hurting. But I don't know how._

So, instead, she said, "Good night, then."

"Good night, Lucy."

#

Denise had expected that after Jessica defected, Emma would call off the Reno operation, assuming it to be compromised. But they attacked anyway— maybe with the hope of finding Jessica _there_.

Homeland Security didn't capture Emma. But they killed several of her men.

A week later, Rittenhouse jumped again.

"Greenwich Village again," Jiya reported. "June 28 th , 1969."

"Stonewall," Lucy and Connor chorused together.

 _Of course_ Rittenhouse was targeting Stonewall.

It was Jiya's turn to pilot. Lucy double-checked that Denise's flash drive, a copy of the one Denise had originally given Lucy, was in its usual place. What if they came back and...?

Lucy strapped in with more than the usual nerves.

They landed. Wyatt groaned, and hurried to the hatch.

"Guys." Jiya's voice was sharp. "The Mothership is back in the present."

"... _what?_ " Lucy stared from Jiya to Garcia.

"That can't be right," Wyatt managed from the door.

"Can _you_ operate this?" Jiya snapped. "But they've moved. They're somewhere near the Oregon/Washington border now."

"Moving to a new base?" Lucy wondered. "But then—"

"Why jump to _this_ day," Garcia said.

They looked at each other.

"Okay," Wyatt said. "We go back, we find out what they changed in five minutes. Then we have two or three hours to plan while the Lifeboat tops up, and we can figure out how to fix it."

None of them wanted to jump again so soon, but no one had a better idea.

The grav trains started their slow lumbering journey up to speed. From the outside, when the Lifeboat took off, it looked like it was there one moment and gone the next. But from the inside, it was just long seconds and moments of shaking and grinding and nausea.

" _Shit_." Jiya flipped several switches. "We're being pulled off course!"

"What do you mean _off course_?" Garcia's eyes snapped open.

"How?" Wyatt said at the same time.

"Someone's overridden the nav system! It's like how I brought you back from 1754— I can't—"

"Can't you _do_ something?" Lucy demanded.

"All I can do is land before the strain tears the ship apart."

The Lifeboat bucked and shook harder than usual. What the hell was happening?

Finally, they crashed to a landing.

The only sound was the grav trains powering down.

"We're in the present." Jiya's voice was steely. "And we're nearly on top of the Mothership."

Rittenhouse... had them.

And the Lifeboat.

"Can we take off again?" Wyatt demanded.

Jiya shook his head. "They'd still have time to catch us in mid-jump and pull us back."

"Exit the Lifeboat," an amplified voice ordered. "Now."

Lucy looked from Garcia to Wyatt. "What do we do?"

A shot pinged off the Lifeboat, echoing loudly inside. "Exit the Lifeboat," the voice repeated.

"We have to go out there." Wyatt sounded grim. "Otherwise they'll destroy this thing."

"Okay, it's like Star Wars, right?" Lucy fumbled for a plan, for comfort, for anything. "We find the source of the tractor beam and we shut it down and get the hell out of here." Rufus would be proud of her analogy. "And we don't even have a princess to rescue."

"... Obi-Wan dies in that movie," Jiya pointed out.

Wyatt opened the hatch.

No one shot at him. He gave them one last long look, then raised his hands and jumped out the front.

Lucy went next, despite Garcia's fierce look—

"Hello, Lucy," Benjamin Cahill said pleasantly.

She nearly fell in shock.

They were in a large, high-ceilinged room, surrounded by at least twenty men with guns. Only Benjamin was unarmed.

Benjamin chuckled. "You're not the only ones who can break someone out of prison, you know," he explained. Then the smile slid off his face. "Ah, speak of the devil."

Lucy heard Garcia jump down behind her and backed up to stand directly in front of him, keeping her hands raised. If Rittenhouse really wanted him dead they could take a head shot or shoot from the side. But she didn't have to make it easy for them. Beside her, Wyatt did the same with Rufus as he jumped down. Unfortunately, they'd be much less reluctant to shoot Wyatt.

Lucy thought so, anyway. But maybe this was another branch of Rittenhouse that had declared open season on her.

Only one way to find out.

"Whatever you want from me," she said, "you're not getting it if you hurt any of my friends. _Any_."

Benjamin had the gall to look surprised. "All I want from you is for you to listen. For us to clear the air." He hesitated. "I'm sorry about your mother, Lucy."

Lucy just ignored that. Except— "How do you know about her?" she demanded. "Have you talked to Emma?"

"I have not had the _pleasure_ of talking with Miss Whitmore, no. We stole the Mothership from under her nose, when she was busy in Reno. Your mother's body was found on the streets of Oakland."

_What?_

"We judged it, correctly, I think, to be a warning from the rogue faction who'd taken over Rittenhouse. That was when we knew we had to act." Benjamin shook his head. "Why don't we sit down where we can talk? Lucy, Miss Marri, Sergeant Logan?" Benjamin glanced behind her, and sighed. "... Flynn."

They were close enough that Lucy could feel Garcia's tension, in the places they brushed together.

Rittenhouse marched them into a room with one long wall of glass, overlooking dramatic pine-covered bluffs, and in the distance, what might have been an angry grey ocean. About half of the men took up position around the edges of the room. Benjamin sat on one side of a large, ostentatious table, his back to the view. The four of them were sat on the other side. "Keep your hands visible," Benjamin told them with another warm smile, "and no one has to be held at gunpoint."

Lucy glanced at the others. Jiya looked coldly determined. Wyatt looked grim. Garcia looked like he wanted to leap across the table and throttle Benjamin with his bare hands.

"You've seen what Emma has done in charge of Rittenhouse." Benjamin's expression turned serious. "That's not an outcome any of us want. It's time Rittenhouse is restored to its original structure, its original purpose... with someone born to it at the head, not someone raised from the common ranks." Benjamin nodded towards Lucy. "You're the last remaining heir of the Keynes line, Lucy. The place is rightfully yours."

"You and everything you stand for nauseate me, and I'll die before I help you."

Her calm statement didn't faze Benjamin. He _chuckled_. "I know we all got off to a bad start," he began.

 _Got off to a bad start_ , she repeatedly silently in disbelief, as Wyatt snorted loudly.

"We're making amends," Benjamin continued. "Trust me, Lucy. We want to do the right thing."

"You don't want to do the right thing, you want to rule the world and get rid of anyone who doesn't forward your nice neat evil little plan."

"Any organization that can't evolve, dies. And so we're evolving." He gave Lucy another of the warm smiles that was meant to invoke companionship and instead turned her stomach. "And my hope for all of you is that when you learn what amends have been made, what amends are going to be made—" He nodded vaguely in Flynn's direction. "You'll be able to understand who your true enemy is."

"You were going to have Rufus _killed_ ," Jiya said.

"So was the man to your left. And yet, here you are."

Jiya looked at Garcia.

"We're not helping you," Lucy said. "Go ahead and kill us now."

Benjamin gave her a chiding look. "Have I threatened any of you since you arrived?" he asked.

"Mmm, you did hold us at gunpoint," Wyatt pointed out.

Benjamin ignored him. "Have I tried, in any way, to get you to tell me anything? Have I even shackled the known terrorist parading through my base? The sooner you realize that we all belong on the same side, the sooner we can get down to the business of stopping Emma."

"Destroy the Mothership and then we'll talk," Lucy said. "Are we done here?"

She couldn't believe it when they were let go. None of them could.

"It's a trap," Wyatt said as they sealed the hatch and rushed to strap in. "It has to be. There's a tracker, or—"

"We'll figure it out _later_ ," Jiya said sharply. "We're jumping to somewhere that's not our base, where we can charge, and we can figure things out there."

They landed in present-day Montana, outside Great Falls. They scrambled out and put some distance between themselves and the Lifeboat— Wyatt's advice.

"Okay," he said. "What the hell just happened? How was that even possible?"

"And why'd they let us go?" Garcia was shaken.

"They caught us mid-jump somehow and pulled us in," Jiya said. "I did it for the three of you coming back from 1754. But on that trip I was monitoring the Lifeboat, I had access to all the information, I could _see_ when you jumped, how could _they_ _—_ "

"Jiya?" Lucy prompted when the other woman didn't continue. Did they have another leak somehow?

Jiya jumped up and started to pace. "I had maybe five seconds' warning to pull you in," she said. "I mean, a jump's not instantaneous. So what if they somehow just— tried to grab us, over and over, every five seconds after the Mothership returned?"

"Would that _work?_ " Garcia asked.

"It would be a tremendous power draw, but I don't know how else to explain it."

"They've have nearly fifty years to work out when we left 1969," Lucy pointed out. "Maybe what they were really doing there was setting up a network of informants bribed to notice anything unusual, and then checking the historical record later. Would it help, them knowing _that_ end of the jump?"

"It might," Jiya said after a minute.

"Right," Wyatt said. "Now we just need to figure out what they wanted with us, why they didn't just kill us, why they let us go—"

"How they got the Mothership," Garcia continued, "who's piloting it for them, and where that base was."

"We don't have to figure this out alone," Lucy said. "Someone call Denise. We need her, and Connor. Preferably with generators."

"I'll hook up the solar charger," Jiya said after a minute. "Give us a bit more juice. Flynn, give me a hand?"

Jiya and Garcia worked on the Lifeboat. Wyatt used the emergency supplies to set up a rudimentary camp, where they could keep an eye on the Lifeboat but be far enough away to escape if someone came after it. Lucy called Denise and then used her terrible cell phone reception to see if Rittenhouse had changed anything at Stonewall.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

Lucy sat on a log and tried not to shiver. This far north, at this time of year, it was already freezing— figuratively, if not quite literally. The pine trees that carpeted the rocky hills didn't block the wind, and they couldn't risk a fire. Her fingers were cold enough to make it difficult to work her phone. But her battery was almost dead anyway.

Garcia sat beside her and draped his jacket over her shoulders.

"Don't _you_ need this?"

He shook his head. "You take it for now. Find anything?"

Lucy gave into temptation and burrowed into the wonderfully warm jacket, zipping it up and pulling the sleeves over her hands. "No. As far as I can tell, they didn't change anything. Though we'll need Connor's program to be sure." She turned off her phone and slid it into her pocket.

She studied him. He hadn't said anything else about their trip to 1944, after that night, and the next night he'd slept in his bed as usual. Sometimes—

Sometimes they all just needed space, in this war.

They spent a miserable cold night before Denise, Rufus, and Connor arrived. Wyatt and Garcia were both very skilled at surviving, but _survival_ and _comfort_ were not _at all_ the same thing. But Lucy forgot how cold she'd been when the Lifeboat came up clean, and kept coming up clean no matter what tests they threw at it.

"All right," Denise said finally. "Jiya, you jump the Lifeboat to these coordinates, in the present." She showed Jiya her phone. "This is a deserted site in the Black Hills where Rittenhouse could plausibly think we're hiding. Someone will meet you there, and drive you back to base. I'll have a team watch the Lifeboat. If Rittenhouse shows up, we grab them—"

"No. I'm not leaving the Lifeboat without a pilot. If they get it, it's over." Jiya folded her arms over her chest.

"She has a point," Garcia said.

"Then what do you suggest?"

"I'll stay with it—"

"We'll all stay with it," Rufus said. "If those dicks show up, we jump it out of there."

They couldn't all go; Connor was going to help continue checking it. By process of elimination, Wyatt went back with Denise: Rufus, Jiya, and Connor were necessary for the Lifeboat, and Lucy was necessary as a historian in case Rittenhouse jumped again. That left Wyatt and Garcia. Their argument about who got to stick with the team escalated until Garcia, looking exasperated, suddenly pulled Wyatt aside.

"A word of _advice_ , Wyatt," Garcia bit out, his tone low and raw. "Always take the chance to see your child when you can."

Lucy looked over her shoulder at them, then belatedly realized she had no business overhearing this. But it was Wyatt who left.

At least he'd be spared the trip itself. The Lifeboat was even worse when it was carrying five people.

And then... nothing happened.

Rittenhouse didn't come after them, or jump. Jiya, Rufus and Connor practically took the Lifeboat apart— but they couldn't find any signs that Rittenhouse had done _anything_ to it except wipe the coordinates of their own base.

Lucy ran Connor's program, and also came up with nothing: no changes from Rittenhouse's trip to 1969. With Garcia's help, she dug deeper, into the kind of history that wouldn't have made Wikipedia. But that meant she was relying on her memory— which was good, but not perfect.

"If they didn't change anything in 1969, then the whole thing was a trap," she finally said, towards the end of the second day. "But _why?_ No changes to history, no changes to the Lifeboat. Just Benjamin Cahill _monologuing_ at us for half an hour." She shook her head. "Was that what this was about? My biological family has the worst ways of trying to get in touch with people."

They jumped back to Nebraska.

#

Rittenhouse jumped.

Jiya looked at the screen. Her eyes widened. "Guys, the Mothership is in 2014."

" _How?_ " Wyatt demanded.

"Oh, God." Rufus looked over her shoulder. " _That's_ what they wanted with the Lifeboat. They copied the Time Warp. Somehow, they knew about it." He sounded grim. "Where are they?"

"They're—" Jiya did a double-take. "They're in... Zagreb."

The garage was very, very quiet.

"July." Garcia's tone was nothing Lucy had ever heard before. "18 th ."

Slowly, Jiya nodded.

"So, they're going back to finish the job?" Rufus guessed. "Take out Flynn while—"

Oh God.

No.

 _Please, no_.

But when had this war ever been merciful?

Slowly, Lucy crossed the floor until she stood directly in front of Garcia.

This might shatter him.

"But that doesn't make any sense," Wyatt said. "They have to know we're going to follow them back, and so Flynn will still come back with _us_."

"They're not going back to kill Garcia," Lucy said quietly.

Slowly, Garcia looked at her.

Oh God. Had he guessed?

Lucy swallowed. "Benjamin Cahill mentioned... making amends." Her voice cracked. "They're going to call off the hit."

Garcia stood like a man turned to stone.

"Um... _why?_ " That was Jiya.

Wyatt got it first. "Because if they never kill Flynn's family, he never... attacks."

"The Mothership would be in their hands the whole time." Rufus sounded stunned. "And the Lifeboat. There would never have been anyone opposing them. At least not until it was too late."

"Even if we come back with the Lifeboat," Jiya guessed, "Rittenhouse will still be in control of... everything. None of the takedowns, raids, arrests... it never would have happened."

"Yeah, but they could also do that by going back and _killing Flynn_ ," Rufus pointed out. "So why... this? Why do you think it's this?"

She tried to catch Garcia's eye, but he refused to make eye contact. "Because." Lucy hated every syllable as it came out of her mouth. "What better way to make sure we don't... stop them?"

The silence was profound.

"But," Rufus said, finally, in an act of bravery that rivaled any she'd ever seen from him. A long silence. "But we... still... have to." A longer silence. "Don't we?"

Finally, Garcia raised his head.

Oh, _God_.

 _I'm sorry_ , Lucy thought desperately. _I'm so sorry, you didn't deserve this, you should've let me go back and kill David, you're too selfless for your own good, I love you, I'm sorry—_

"Flynn?" Wyatt said quietly.

"Garcia," she said very softly, when he didn't respond.

"You're asking me to do this?" he bit out in disbelief— to her, not Wyatt. His voice was harsh, his accent thick.

He wasn't ruthless enough to make this decision. But she—

She was horrified to discover that maybe she was.

Except—

"No." She frowned. "Maybe not. Garcia— what if you warned your previous self what was going to happen? What if you told him how to keep Lorena and Iris safe, and explained to him about Rittenhouse? About what he needs to do?"

Slowly, Garcia seemed to transform from stone back into a flesh-and-blood man. From a volcano, more like: stone bottling up tremendous pressure and destructive force. "And make sure he fights them anyway."

"That could work." Wyatt sounded incredibly relieved.

Relieved, because, of course, all Garcia would have to do was keep them here. Temporarily disable the Lifeboat, somehow, or even just barricade himself inside for a few hours. And then the present would change, and they would never notice.

"Okay, _we have to go_ ," Rufus said "If they're mucking around in the recent past, who knows what else they could change." He looked at Connor. "Uh, tell Agent Christopher..."

Connor looked shellshocked. "Uh— right. Right."

"Are you sure you're up to piloting the Time Warp?" Jiya asked.

Rufus nodded. "You showed me, remember?"

Jiya looked grim, but didn't argue. But she gave him what looked like a searing kiss, and said something too quietly for Lucy to catch. Then the four of them climbed into the Lifeboat.

"Flynn?" Wyatt asked.

Garcia looked at him blankly.

"You gotta brief us, man."

"It was just— an ordinary— day," Garcia said slowly, as the Lifeboat started to rumble. He sounded bewildered. Lucy took his hand, and she didn't give a damn what the others thought.

"My company had a small office. I was there."

He swallowed.

"Lorena was home with Iris. They went— They went to the grocery store mid afternoon." His voice turned husky, and then he couldn't be heard over the noise of the jump.

Like before, the jump went on, and on, _and on_. Did it take them longer to disappear and reappear? Was that it? She'd never watched a Time Warp jump from the outside.

Whatever it was, it was miserable.

At least nobody threw up this time, but when she undid her restraints, Lucy would've slid to the floor if Wyatt hadn't grabbed her. Her head was spinning and throbbing at the same time.

They climbed out of the Lifeboat. Garcia looked around in— awe, bewilderment, something. He breathed in slowly, then out, and shook his head, as if he couldn't believe it.

"Flynn?" Wyatt's voice was more careful than Lucy had ever heard it, addressed to Garcia. "Your office?"

They didn't have to steal clothes this time, and Garcia knew exactly where they were going. They got there in late afternoon. Garcia knew the codes, of course, and let them in the back door.

"Oh God," Rufus muttered behind her.

The first thing Lucy noticed was how heartbreakingly young Garcia had looked, just three years earlier.

The second thing she noticed was the gun.

"I'm you from 2017," her own Garcia said quickly, both hands in plain sight.

"That's impossible," Other Garcia snapped. "What the hell is this?" He looked past Garcia to the three of them, bewildered, then back to himself.

"Is it really? Didn't you just four days ago find a money trail that went to finance Connor Mason's time travel project?" Garcia watched himself. "It's real, you know." He added something, in a language Lucy didn't recognize, that made Other Garcia's eyes widen. As Garcia kept speaking, Other Garcia's head tilted in disbelief.

Finally, he lowered the gun, and let them into a small room.

"Rittenhouse," Garcia said.

"That name was all over the financials. Who are they?" Other Garcia demanded. "What do you know about them? Why are you here?"

"Rittenhouse," Garcia said, "is a secret organization that's been trying to take over the world since 1780."

"That's not funny," Other Garcia said.

Garcia looked at him. "No," he said drily. "It's not." After a long moment, he continued: "They financed a pair of time machines so they could go back to key moments in history and change things to their advantage. Strangle the Civil Rights movement in its cradle, make sure the South wins the Civil War... a few months ago we stopped them from wiping out the Nineteenth Amendment."

"Our NSA contact," Garcia added heavily after a minute, "is working with them."

Other Garcia frowned. "He gave me the job."

"I don't think he knew what the files were going to reveal. But— he's already tipped them off. There's a hit squad coming to the apartment, tonight. To kill you, and Lorena, and Iris."

Other Garcia was on his feet. Garcia grabbed him before he took a second step. " _Sit down_."

"I have to—" Other Garcia tried to break Garcia's hold, but Garcia wasn't fooled.

"I'm _you_ , remember? I know all the tricks you know and then some."

" _Damn_ you, let me—"

"In my timeline they succeed!"

Other Garcia stared at himself.

Garcia's face was etched with pain. "They kill Iris and Lorena," he said quietly. "Only we make it out alive."

Other Garcia tried to bolt again. Garcia had his gun out and pointed at Other Garcia's head faster than Lucy could follow.

Other Garcia looked from the gun to Garcia. " _That_ doesn't seem like a good idea."

"You have," Garcia said, " _to listen_."

Slowly, Other Garcia stepped back.

"What do we do?" Other Garcia asked quietly. "I take them off the grid, disappear?"

"You can't," Garcia said. He put the gun down, and looked tired and desperate. "This is Lucy." He tilted his head in her direction. "In my timeline, Rittenhouse frames me for Iris and Lorena's murders, and I run. All I want is to kill them before I kill myself. I make it to São Paulo, and she walks in, except it's a version of her from sometime next decade."

Other Garcia gave himself a look extremely eloquent in its sarcasm.

"She was the one who told me how to fight Rittenhouse," Garcia continued. "And she gave me her journal."

"Her journal from the future?" Other Garcia said in disbelief.

"I can't believe I was this stupid three years ago," Garcia muttered. " _Yes_. So I waited, for two years. When Rittenhouse's time machine was complete, I stole it from Connor Mason. And I started fighting Rittenhouse through time. Through the past."

Other Garcia raised his eyebrows. "And?"

"We thought we'd taken them out," Garcia said quietly. "We were wrong. But the point is, if you don't fight them, _none_ of this happens. _They. Win_." He stared at his younger self. "So get the hell out of here, hide Lorena and Iris somewhere safe... and then get to São Paulo. Wait for Lucy." He hesitated. "Take them to Beirut," he added. "Tala will help you."

After a minute, Other Garcia dropped his facade of sarcasm: "This isn't _believable_ ," he said helplessly.

"You have to believe it. You have to believe _me_." Garcia's voice turned harsh. "It's the only way to save the world and— our family." His voice hitched.

Other Garcia stared at him for a long moment. He said something in— Croatian, presumably. It sounded stunned.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you for the last ten minutes," Garcia snapped.

"Then who are they?"

"Lucy you know about." Garcia turned to look at them. "Rufus, uh, pilots the time machine, and Wyatt... shoots things."

Wyatt looked at him.

"Anything else?" Other Garcia asked.

"They come between two and three in the morning," Garcia said quickly. "They're at the front door and in the street below. They go for Iris first."

"We'll be gone by then." Other Garcia pressed his thumb to a panel of his desk, then entered a code. The bottom drawer opened, and he took out passports, cash, weapons.

"Be careful," Garcia added. "They must already have you—us— under surveillance. But we didn't see anybody on the way in."

Other Garcia nodded once and shoveled everything into a duffel. Then he hesitated. "You haven't seen them in three years?" He sounded disbelieving, but not aimed at Garcia.

Garcia nodded once.

"Do you want to... come with me?"

"I'll see them when I get back to my present," Garcia said. "I'll replace you, you know."

"Garcia, go with him." Lucy wasn't sure what made her say it.

Garcia looked down at her. Other Garcia also looked at her, then between the two of them sharply.

"Uhh," Garcia said. "Bring... bring them out on the balcony." His voice husked. "Just for a minute."

The long look Other Garcia and Garcia shared nearly brought Lucy to tears. "You could pretend to _be_ me," Other Garcia offered.

Garcia closed his eyes a moment, longing evident in his features. Then he opened them and shook his head. "If there's one thing I can't pretend to be, it's you," he said harshly. "Just bring them out. That would be enough."

"All right."

"Is there, uh, anything you need?" Wyatt asked. "Flynn? Now-Flynn, I mean? To get them out?"

Other Garcia studied him, consideringly. "How good are you? Can you get us a car, clean?" He glanced at Garcia. "Is he competent? Can he be trusted?"

"With this? Yes."

Wyatt gave Garcia a... complicated look.

Somehow Lucy ended up going with the two Garcias while Rufus went with Wyatt to get the Flynns a car. She didn't think she had any right to come with him, but— she didn't like the thought of him going alone, either.

The Flynns lived across the street from a park. She and Garcia split off from Other Garcia and waited just inside the tree line. They waited.

Lucy stared at the wall of balconies. Had Other Garcia just been playing along to get the crazy strangers out of his office?

One of the doors slid open. Other Garcia stepped out, with—

Garcia breathed in sharply, deeper than Lucy would've thought possible.

Lucy looked at the woman on the balcony, and the little girl she was holding. Other Garcia took Iris from Lorena, smiled down at her, said something to her, and carried her to the edge of the balcony, turning so she looked out at the street.

Garcia stared at the three like a starving man in front of a feast. He roughly wiped his eyes, then did it again.

They stood there like that for several long minutes.

Finally, Other Garcia turned towards the door, opened it, and gestured for Lorena to precede him, with an achingly familiar gesture. Garcia stared at the door long after Lucy was able to see any movement in the room beyond.

Then he turned sharply away. "Come on," he growled, voice breaking.

They met the others back at the Lifeboat. "The car's at the office," Wyatt said. "Right where I said I'd leave it."

"And, uh... the Mothership's back in the present," Rufus said.

They all looked at each other. Rittenhouse had done what they'd come to do.

So had the team. Now, they could only hope it had been enough.

Garcia was dazed as they climbed in and strapped in. He shook his head, then shook it again, as if to clear it. He met Lucy's gaze only once. But it wasn't hard to tell what he was thinking. In a few minutes, he'd to return to a world where— hopefully— Lorena and Iris were still alive.

Wyatt was watching Garcia with open concern. As they both strapped in, Wyatt reached out, hesitated, then clapped him once on the shoulder.

Rufus put his phone away, and flipped switches. The grav trains rumbled up to speed, and then the long, tortuous jump began. The Lifeboat shook until Lucy's teeth chattered in her head. They trundled through time and space—

Something hit the Lifeboat.

Lucy flinched, and looked out the hatch as more— those were bullets. The world outside melted and wavered, but it was quickly becoming more solid, and—

"They're _shooting_ at us!" she screamed. Several, _dozens_ of figures waiting for them in the familiar garage— she saw the faint outlines of heavy artillery— what might have been a dark figure or two slumped across the console—

"Oh no you don't," Rufus muttered. He flipped a series of switches in succession— something in the Lifeboat made a hair-raising electronic wail—

With a tremendous jerk, the world disappeared again.

This was worse than any jump Lucy had ever experienced. Worse than all of them put together. She could barely see. Was she about to faint? Or was it reality itself?

Garcia grabbed her and tried to hold her steady. He couldn't, but she clung to him for the contact. She reached for Wyatt— he was slumped, non-responsive, in his seat.

Rufus was— what the hell, Rufus was _coding_ — fighting with the Lifeboat with one hand, typing with the other—

She felt a wave of non-existence, and was startled to feel herself snap back into reality. But another wave was coming, bigger, stronger—

She watched with horror as Garcia's face, the walls of the Lifeboat, her own fingers, elongated and warped. She felt gravity tugging her in all directions at once. Oh God, what a horrible way to—

_Thud!_

They stopped moving.

Lucy discovered she still knew how to breathe.

She still had all her body parts, too. That was... that was great.

Garcia fumbled with her restraints as the Lifeboat filled with smoke. She tried to shake herself into alertness. Her fingers didn't want to cooperate, but Wyatt still wasn't moving. "I'm fine," she slurred. "Get Wyatt."

Somehow, they all tumbled out of the Lifeboat to a jarringly familiar skyline. Lucy felt a strong wave of nausea. She fell to her knees and gagged, but didn't bring anything up.

"Just give it a minute." Rufus's voice sounded strange, but at least he looked like a normal human obeying the laws of familiar, if apparently not ubiquitous, physics.

Finally, Lucy sat up, feeling like her skin would hold her together.

Wyatt stirred. "Wthll."

Lucy helped him sit up. He opened his eyes, winced, and shook his head. "Fuck," he muttered. "Feels like the ten worst hangovers I ever had, put together." He groaned. "What happened?"

"You passed out," Rufus said.

"I meant more generally."

"Right," Rufus said. "Um."

He looked at Garcia, who'd turned back to stone.

"Uh," Rufus said again. "I turned my phone on right before we left 2014 the last time—"

"Are we back there now?" Wyatt sounded incredulous.

"Yeah. So it, um, pulled in the news as soon as we got close enough that, you know, it could." He held out his phone so Lucy could see.

She skimmed the headlines. "Oh my _God_. How— we only went back to 2014—"

"But we got back to a timeline where Rittenhouse—"

"Had unfettered access to a time machine," Lucy finished for him. She glanced at the news again, and felt sick. "And used it a lot. Apparently."

"Let me see." Wyatt looked over her shoulder. "— _Fuck!_ " He shook his head. "Wait. So we're in 2014 of that timeline?"

"... no," Rufus said.

"Rufus," Wyatt said. "Where are we?"

"The, uh, Time Warp takes longer to take off and land than a normal jump," Rufus said. "Remember how Jiya kind of landed when she escaped Rittenhouse but she didn't stick the landing? Like that, but more. They opened fire before we'd fully materialized, and we still kind of had one foot in each timeline, if you want to think of it that way. So... I figured out how to bring us back here."

"Why?" Lucy asked. Her brain seemed to be struggling through molasses.

"Well, first, we didn't want land in a 2014 where lynching was legal and higher education for women without their father or husband's permission was not. Trust me. Second..."

He glanced at Garcia.

"This timeline was where it started," he said finally.

"You just— did that on the fly?" Wyatt was apparently not thinking through the horrifying implications of this yet like Lucy was.

Rufus shrugged. "I am a genius."

"Wait," Lucy said. "So we could go back to— _any_ timeline?"

Rufus shook his head. "No. It only worked this time because we were still in transit. I think if we tried it any other way, we'd die." He hesitated. "Uh, we may also die when we return? I'm not sure."

"You're not—" Wyatt managed, and then a wave of pain or nausea hit him, and he moaned.

"So we— exist three times right now," Lucy said.

"Yeah," Rufus said. "For example, I'm in the Bay Area once and here twice. Same for you. It's why we kind of feel like shit."

"So we... have to fix things here," Lucy said quietly.

She looked at Garcia.

He hadn't moved, or spoken, or done anything besides breathe, since he first sat down.

"We have to find whoever Rittenhouse brought here from 2017," Wyatt said. "And... stop them."

And leave Lorena and Iris Flynn to die.

"There's got to be another way," she said desperately.

"Lucy, we already tried," Rufus said quietly. "Flynn already tried. It... didn't work."

"No. We can't just—"

"We have to." Wyatt sounded bleak. "It's this, or Rittenhouse wins."

"We could go back to the new 2017 and fight our way back through history, point by point, bring things back to the way they were—" Lucy's eyes were blurring, her voice breaking.

"With no support system?" Rufus demanded. "With Rittenhouse able to track our every move because they have access to our equipment? We have enough juice to get home. Then how do we even recharge?"

"You can— you can figure it out—"

"That's a war we _can't_ _win_ , Lucy," Wyatt said.

"But— the four of us—"

"And what about the certain knowledge that every time we failed, every time we didn't fix something, we'd've condemned millions of people to suffering and dying horribly?" Rufus demanded. "Lucy, in this timeline, they _culled_ the population during the Great Depression!"

She shook her head, and wiped her face, fighting for counterarguments, for another way out.

"Weren't you ready to ask this of him back there in 2017?" Rufus added, more calmly.

Lucy looked at Garcia.

"No," she whispered, whether in answer to Rufus's question, or as a plea to the universe, she didn't know.

"Lucy," Wyatt said gently, but in a tone she couldn't ignore.

She looked at him.

"Why'd your future self go back to Flynn in São Paulo?" he asked. "He ever tell you?"

"She needed—" Lucy's voice cracked. "She needed someone to fight them. Sooner. Before—"

"... before it was too late?" he guessed, when she didn't finish sharing her own guesses.

Lucy looked away.

"Lucy, this is how the timeline originally _was_ ," Wyatt continued. "And I know— look, I know you don't believe in putting things back the way they were for their own sake any more. But we're not..." His own voice faltered. "Making things worse." He hesitated. "He's lived with this for three years, Lucy."

"Lived with the hope of getting them back!"

"Flynn?" Rufus said.

Lucy looked up from Wyatt, and over to the other two.

Slowly, Garcia raised his head.

"No," he said.

Lucy felt Wyatt stiffen. Then relax into something worse: resignation. She stepped around him, putting herself between him and Garcia.

"Get your head out of your ass," Rufus snapped.

" _Rufus!_ " What the hell was it about her teammates, that they always managed to say—

Garcia looked genuinely shocked. " _What?_ " He got to his feet— Lucy darted between _them_ —

Rufus stepped around her and shoved his phone in front of Garcia. "Twenty-five miles from our base, a man was publicly beaten _to death_ for being gay, two days before we would've returned," he growled, in a tone Lucy had never heard from Rufus before. "A woman was hung for having an abortion. Segregation is apparently enshrined in the Constitution. They write about Native Americans in the _past tense_. This is bigger than you, this is bigger than your family!"

Garcia stared down at him.

"People are suffering," Rufus added. "Millions of them. And man, I am so, so sorry—" His voice cracked. "That it has to be this way. I cannot imagine what you're feeling right now. But I know..." He swallowed. "I know what we have to do."

Slowly, Wyatt stepped up to stand beside Rufus.

Lucy pushed between them. "Garcia." She swallowed.

 _What do you want?_ would be asinine. _What do you choose—?_

He stared down at her, furious, disbelieving, griefstricken—

"Somehow you manage to be the most merciless of all," he said finally. He spun, heading away—

Towards the city, not the Lifeboat.

"Flynn," Wyatt called. "I can— I can do it."

"Get in my way and I'll shoot you myself."

The three of them exchanged looks.

"How are you even going to find Rittenhouse's agent?" Rufus asked. "This is a huge city."

"We'll figure that out," Wyatt said. "You just make sure the Lifeboat can get us home alive."

"Right," Rufus muttered. "Sure. Just that."

"Yeah, exactly. Lucy—"

She shook her head. "I'm going with Garcia."

Wyatt grabbed her arm as she turned away. "Lucy, I know you and he— but he's dangerous like this—"

She yanked away. "Of course he's dangerous!" she snapped. "I would be dangerous too in this situation! So would you! So would Rufus!" She glared at Wyatt for a moment, then just sprinted after Garcia.

#

She managed to keep Garcia from killing anyone in his search for the Rittenhouse messenger.

Just.

Or maybe he was too caught up in his tunnel vision to even think of it.

She was afraid they made a horribly memorable pair, the huge, grim, machine-like man, and the tear-streaked woman in his wake. Because she couldn't stop crying. There had to be some way out of this. If only she could find it. If only she were cleverer. If only she'd worked harder— fought harder— blown up the Mothership— ignored him when he talked her out of killing David Rittenhouse—

He must regret that one bitterly, now.

She could have stopped all this five times over, if she'd just been _better_ . But she hadn't, she'd failed, and now, _now_ , she was out of ideas.

Some scholar, some thinker, _she_ was.

In the end it was sheer, bitter luck that they found the man at all. Lucy caught up with Garcia at the end of an alley, concealed behind some bins, and suddenly he was there ahead of them. Garcia raised his gun—

He sighted again—

He lowered the gun with an inhuman noise, his hands shaking.

He swallowed and tried again, but he—

Oh God.

Two silenced shots. The man fell.

Wyatt stepped out of a cross street, face set. She hadn't even known he was nearby.

Lucy kept her hand on Garcia's gun— but he'd stopped fighting. He sank to the ground, motionless.

Wyatt searched the body and jogged towards them. "That was definitely him," he said grimly. He showed Lucy a piece of paper. It was short, with two instructions: one, the orders to kill the Flynn family were remanded. Two, Rittenhouse was to begin identifying all the possible government facilities in which a time machine could recharge so that they would know where to find the Lifeboat on September 30 th , 2017.

"We have to get out of here," Wyatt added. "Come on."

Together, they managed to get Garcia up, one of them on each side. They stumbled across the city, a surreal nightmare journey that stood out even against the horror of the last twenty-four hours. Garcia breathed. He put one foot in front of the other. He turned in one direction or another when they nudged him.

She didn't think he could do anything else.

The police almost caught them, twice, because Garcia wasn't capable of more than a shambling run. But finally they made it back to the Lifeboat.

"Rufus," Wyatt said. " _Please_ tell me we're ready to go."

"We're as ready as we'll ever be. We might even survive the trip. Did you, uh—"

Rufus looked at Garcia, and didn't finish his question.

Lucy strapped Garcia in. His eyes didn't focus on her face, or anything else. The trip back was nearly as bad as the trip there. But he stayed that way the whole time.

"Look," Rufus ordered, his voice strained, as they started to land.

"It— it's clear," Lucy managed. "I see, I think I see Jiya. No Rittenhouse."

So Rufus let them come fully through into 2017.

The grav trains slowed. No one spoke.

Rufus flipped a couple of switches. "Okay, uh, we _can't_ go back there again," he announced, checking the console. "We almost punched a hole in space-time as it is."

Mechanical and blind, Garcia took off his restraints, pushing Lucy's hands away when she tried to help. He climbed out of the Lifeboat, ignoring Denise's questions—

Oh God. Lucy was so glad to see Denise. And Connor. And Jiya.

Garcia walked out of the Lifeboat bay. She tried to go after him, but her legs just gave out. Wyatt was throwing up in a trash can.

Lucy started to cry, and then she couldn't stop.

They'd _tortured_ Garcia in the cruelest way possible— but she couldn't, she couldn't, in just a second—

"Did you stop Rittenhouse?" Denise's voice was sharp with worry. "Why is Lucy—"

"Yeah." Wyatt's voice was bleak. "Yeah, we did."

Jiya was holding Rufus. Connor was going over the Lifeboat. Denise knelt beside Lucy and put her arms around her. "Hey," she said quietly. "Hey."

Lucy let Denise hug her, and then pulled away. Unsteadily, she went into the house and down the hall. She turned the knob—

"Go away, Lucy!"

She let go like it had burned her, and backed away.

At least he was talking.

Jiya lent her some clothes. Lucy showered. She wanted to stay in there for hours, but the dirt she was trying to shed was psychic, not physical. She joined the others in the living room. Someone handed her food, and she ate it.

Distantly, she heard Denise telling them, "You did the right thing."

"We didn't do the right thing," Lucy whispered. The room got quiet. "We did the only thing. But not the right one."

She managed to get up, somehow. She needed to check on Garcia.

She knocked on the door, prepared to say she only needed some things. But she got no answer. Was he asleep?

She opened the door. The room was empty.

There was a piece of paper on her pillow.

 _I can't stay right now_ , it said. _I'm sorry. I'll come back if I can_.

She stared at it, but the letters did not assume a different shape.

She looked around. He had very little, and he'd left most of it here. He'd taken a couple of extra guns.

She started to lock the window, then hesitated. She left it open.

She could pretend he was sleeping, to let him have as much of a head start as he could to do whatever it was he was doing. That idea lasted until she went out to the living room and Denise looked at her face.

"Lucy? What is it?"

Wyatt... un-frowned, in disappointed understanding. "Flynn's gone," he guessed.

Lucy nodded.

Denise swore, which was the first time Lucy had ever heard that. "I have to make some calls."

"No," Lucy snapped. The return of her voice startled her. "You should be getting him a _pardon_ , not a team of hunters."

Denise stared at her. "I know you care about him. But he's still a fugitive, Lucy. And that's not how pardons—"

"This has nothing to do with that. After what he did today?" Lucy demanded.

"Lucy, he was practically catatonic," Rufus said.

"He found the Rittenhouse go-between!" Rufus hadn't been with them for that. "And do you, either of you, _really_ think we could've done that if he'd actually been determined to stop us?"

Wyatt looked away.

Rufus rubbed the back of his neck. "... no," he admitted.

"We have used him and pushed him past the point of human endurance, and I have no idea where he is, what he's doing, or how he even found the strength to _get up_ after what happened today, because God knows I couldn't. But the last thing he deserves is to be hunted across the country, to be thrown back in prison—"

"No one's throwing him back in prison," Denise promised. "But he may need our help, Lucy. And in his current state, I doubt he's going to ask for it. If he comes across Rittenhouse? Do you really want him dying alone somewhere?"

After a long moment, Lucy looked down. "He said he'd come back if he could," she whispered.

She suddenly couldn't stay in here any more. She headed for the back door.

"Lucy," Wyatt called behind her.

"I— I'm fine," she managed. "I just need some air."

She ended up perched on the same fence from before. She stared across the prairie. Garcia hadn't been gone long. He couldn't have gotten far. Was he close by, somewhere? Was he—

But he wouldn't have left that note if he'd just meant a few hours' absence.

It would be a fool's errand to try to follow him not knowing what direction he'd taken. She nevertheless felt like she was failing him by not trying.

As the sun set, she clung to the fact that he'd said he'd try to come back. It was frankly more than she would have expected. He'd joined them to fight Rittenhouse and to try to get his family back. They were at best maintaining the status quo against Rittenhouse, and his family...

Numbly, she watched the sun set.

A quiet footstep startled her. Her head snapped up. She felt deeply ashamed of her disappointment when she saw who it was.

"Hey." Rufus approached her carefully, and offered her a jacket. "Thought you might want this."

She hadn't even noticed the dropping temperature until he'd spoken. She shrugged into the coat. "Thanks," she whispered.

He leaned against the fence beside her. "So, I'm, uh, glad you didn't just go all Bilbo Baggins on us like Flynn."

She stared at the prairie.

In her peripheral vision, she saw him glance at her, make some kind of face, and look away.

They sat in silence for a while. In the end, it was the miracle of his very _thereness_ that penetrated. She turned and hugged him, which turned into her burying her face against his shoulder.

"Hey," he said quietly. "Hey, it's okay. We have a washing machine now that isn't held together with baling wire and duct tape, so no matter how much snot you get on me, _it will wash out_."

She managed a watery chuckle.

"I'm, uh, sorry he, uh..."

She shook her head before Rufus— kind, generous Rufus— could fumble for more words to express sympathy over the absence of the man who'd had him shot. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters to you," Rufus said quietly. "And you matter." He hesitated. "And I'm not saying Flynn and I will ever be BFFs, but..." Another pause. "But that was _brutal_." He shook his head slowly.

" _We_ were brutal." Her voice came out unsteady and raw. "What did we do today, Rufus?"

"We didn't have a choice."

"Everyone keeps saying that but what's the point of having a fucking _time machine_ —" She bit off the rest of that. "I wish you hadn't stopped me."

"No," Rufus said firmly. "We finish this together."

"Together? He's out there _alone_ —" She cut herself off again, because, of all of them, it wasn't fair to ask Rufus to worry about Garcia.

Rufus winced. "I know."

"Alone in every way," she added, "because we were supposed to have his back and what did we do instead?" She shook her head. Paused. Took a deep breath.

"Intellectually," she continued, more calmly, "I know what we did made a huge difference for a lot of people. I know it was _everything_ for some people. But—" Her voice dropped to an anguished whisper. "But it _feels_ like if Rittenhouse can get us to do _that_ , they've already won."

Maybe their consciences, their being good people, would end up being sacrificed in the war just like Iris and Lorena... had been.

"Or, maybe, Rittenhouse needed us to do _that_ because they're desperate and they're not making any headway," Rufus said.

She shook her head. "Even if we win, what are we going to have?"

"We're going to have each other."

 _Are we?_ she wanted to ask, thinking of Garcia out there.

But Rufus... Rufus was back.

Maybe she could try to believe him.

"Where's the Mothership now?" Lucy asked after a minute.

"The Coast Range. North of Portland. Agent Christopher's making some calls." Rufus glanced at her. "Hey, not to be totally condescending here, but... maybe you should sleep? That double jump took it out of all of us. Not to mention..."

Not to mention the rest of it.

"You're right." She forced herself to her feet. "I know it kind of got lost in the shuffle, and I'm not going to pretend to know anything about how you dragged us back into this timeline, but... I'm really glad you figured that out on the fly."

Rufus snorted. "Trust me, so am I."

They went back to the house. Lucy got ready for bed, and then...

Stared at the walls of the too-quiet bedroom.

Someone knocked. Lucy looked up sharply, then felt ashamed to be disappointed when Jiya came in.

Jiya gave her a sympathetic smile. "Just me. Listen, do you want me to sleep over tonight?"

Lucy blinked at her. "... what?"

"Or you could share our room. I was just thinking... it might feel a little empty in here. I won't, I won't take his bed," she added.

Lucy felt herself tear up, again, wearyingly. "I'm sorry I didn't offer after Chinatown," she whispered. Hadn't even thought of it. But Jiya, now, was speaking from experience.

"You had a few other things on your mind then."

"Take— take mine." Lucy shifted across the narrow aisle to Garcia's bed and stared Jiya down. Jiya didn't comment. Lucy wrapped herself in his blanket.

"I need you to tell me about this timeline," she said after a minute.

"Sure. Rufus and I've been talking about it, it sounds pretty similar."

She indulged Lucy's questions until Lucy reached the same conclusion. About all that was different was Rittenhouse had tracked down the evidence of 2017 Garcia's rampage across Zagreb in search of their own person and used it as further evidence to frame 2014 Garcia.

Finally, Lucy turned out the lights and curled up and buried her face against the pillow that smelled of him. Where was he, now?

 _Keep him safe_ , she prayed. _Please. Keep him safe._

It seemed too much to ask, even of a higher power, that he could ever heal from this.

#

The chime of an incoming text woke her.

Lucy fumbled above her head, didn't feel the desk at all, realized she was in Garcia's bed—

The memory of the day hit her like a gut blow.

Jiya handed her her phone. It was a little past one. The text was from a number Lucy didn't recognize: _I'm unhurt_.

Relief rushed through her, making her eyes water and her hands shake. Lucy stabbed the dial button, but it just rang, and rang. It didn't even go to voicemail. She wrote back quickly: _where are you_ . Then: _can i help._

She didn't get a response. She called him again. When he didn't pick up, she slumped back against the pillows.

"Flynn?" Jiya asked.

Lucy nodded.

Somehow, even in the headspace he had to be in, even when he couldn't bring himself to talk to her, even after what she'd had to help him do—

He knew how much she'd worry.

Maybe he remembered what had happened right after he'd walked into the bunker. She didn't know.

"It's not that he left," Lucy said finally. "It's that he's out there alone and I can't even imagine what he's feeling right now." Or maybe she just was too afraid to try.

"I'll admit that you and him wasn't exactly what I was expecting," Jiya said after a minute.

Lucy was too tired to say _it's not like that_ . She didn't know if that were true. If it _were_ true, she had no idea what in the hell it _was_ like.

"But I _saw_ you after Chinatown. Those first weeks in Florida? Look, I've... had to learn to believe what I see, and... and he meant a lot to you."

Lucy nodded numbly at Jiya's use of the past tense.

"And you, uh, meant a lot to him. I— I think you have to trust that that's enough."

Lucy looked up.

"I mean, he left you the note, right? And he texted you. He clearly hasn't reverted to being, like, a one hundred percent murderbot, or anything."

"I know," Lucy said softly. "I just wish I could help."

"Maybe you are."

It was late. She was keeping Jiya up with all these... with all this stuff. "Maybe," Lucy agreed politely. "Hey, um... thanks." She lay down again and tried to sleep. Tried.

Mentioning the text in the morning led to a battle royale with Denise over trying to trace Garcia. "Fine," Lucy snapped, finally relinquishing her phone. "But if there are any other texts, any _calls_ , I _want to know_ . They're _to me_ , not just pieces of paper in this fox and hound chase."

"Of course," Denise promised.

With that fight over, the shit feeling with which she'd woken returned full force. She couldn't give into it. She forced herself to choke some breakfast down. Then, grimly, she fired up the simulator.

That evening, she got another text from a strange number: _Still unhurt_.

She called immediately, but Garcia didn't pick up. _please let us help,_ she wrote back. _you don't have to do this alone._ Then: _i'm so sorry we couldn't fix it before. but we can help now._

She didn't get a reply.

But she noticed that the number was different from the night before. Had he gotten multiple burners just so he could keep in touch with her without Denise tracing him? If you could call this keeping in touch... but she liked it better than the alternative.

She had a breakthrough the next day, but it was nothing to do with Garcia.

"Someone saw us." She turned the laptop to show Wyatt and Rufus as they sat at the kitchen table.

Wyatt studied the digitized entry. "Right. As Rufus and Jiya were having their little reunion."

"'Little' is not the word I would use," Rufus muttered, also reading.

She sat down. "If Rittenhouse saw this _and_ they translated the Klingon in Jiya's note, and realized this place isn't those coordinates..."

"... they figured out we were there twice," Wyatt finished.

She nodded. "And they must've figured out the Time Warp existed."

Rufus shook his head. "I really, really, _really_ hate these bastards."

Lucy huffed softly in agreement.

"So what do they do next?" Rufus added. "Rittenhouse with the ability to cross their own timeline is terrifying. Why are they just sitting there?"

"Maybe, like us, they discovered how easily you can screw something up," Lucy offered. She desperately wanted this pause not to be just another part of Rittenhouse's plan. Their opening gambit had been cruel enough.

#

"It's Flynn!" Wyatt yelled.

She bolted into the living room, as the others did. When she saw he was on the phone, disappointment rushed her— but—

"It's Flynn," Wyatt repeated. "He's found Rittenhouse. He wants help taking them down."

Wyatt put the phone on speaker and they gathered around. "Where the _hell_ have you _been_?" Denise demanded, working on her laptop. She was probably trying to start a trace of the call. "I have teams out searching for you—"

"Rittenhouse is holed up outside of Astoria."

Lucy wrapped her arms tightly around herself and closed her eyes at his rough, familiar voice. A mix of relief, longing, and anger rushed through her.

Denise's hands stilled. "How'd you find them?"

Rittenhouse had somehow muffled the Lifeboat's tracking signal at the same time they'd overridden the nav system. Connor, watching frantically at the base, had gotten faint pings from somewhere west, but that had been it.

"The place they took us looked like the Pacific Northwest. Jiya said grabbing us like they did would take a lot of energy. I got Pacific Power's last year of usage records and looked for spikes."

Just the way he was biting off his words told Lucy volumes about the pain he was in. But he'd called them, he was talking... he'd called _Wyatt_ for _help_.

"'Got?'" Denise repeated.

"Don't worry. No one's dead."

Denise's look at the phone also spoke volumes.

"They have a compound," Garcia continued.

"Of course they do," Rufus muttered. "What's a bunch of evil psychopath megalomaniacs without an off-grid compound?"

"Not off-grid, or Flynn wouldn't've been able to find them," Jiya pointed out.

"They must have a sizable remnant of the original Rittenhouse here. Maybe thirty people. I can't take that many alone. Wyatt?"

"I can send a team," Denise began.

"I'm not asking for a team," Garcia said. "I'm asking for Wyatt. If you're not coming, I'm going in by myself."

"Absolutely _not_ ," Denise said. "This might be our only opportunity. We're not taking any chances."

Wyatt glanced at her. "You did have me raid Rittenhouse alone before because you didn't know who you could trust."

"Yes, and we've successfully hit them since then without any leaks. The two of you aren't going alone. Besides." She looked from Wyatt to the phone. " _If_ the two of you manage to take the compound successfully— _somehow_ — what are you going to do with it?"

Long pause.

They negotiated over the team, and then turned to tactical discussion. Lucy watched Connor frown thoughtfully. "Here's an idea," he said finally. "Can we keep the Mothership from getting away, by using what they did to you to bring you in?"

"Where would we get that kind of power?" Jiya asked. Denise let them go back and forth for a moment, and then told them to work up a plan if they had one.

"I'll leave by an hour from now," Wyatt said.

"The team will meet him in Portland," Denise added. "Assuming you're planning to keep _this_ number, Flynn, you can work out the details when they've rendezvoused."

"Fine." Another long pause, while they all tried to figure out if they were missing any details.

Then: "Would someone go get Lucy?" He sounded tired.

She cleared her throat. "I'm here, Flynn."

The others exchanged looks.

"... I'm going to go, uh, the Lifeboat." Rufus headed purposefully for the door.

"Right, why don't we help you with that," Connor said, as he and Jiya followed. Denise and Wyatt also made themselves scarce, Wyatt with a long backwards look at her.

"Thanks for letting me know you were alive," Lucy said after a minute. "And not, you know, dead in a ditch, or captured by Rittenhouse, or in trouble with the police, or—"

"I couldn't stay."

His voice was guttural, and her resentment left her in a rush. She felt like a terrible person. "Okay," she said quietly.

She took the phone into their room, for more privacy.

"I'm— sorry..." he added—

"Don't." She cut him off. _Him_ apologizing was— God, it was obscene.

"Don't," she repeated. " _I'm_ sorry. Garcia, I'm—"

"I know."

Neither of them seemed willing to let the other finish their sentences, but Lucy thought, knew, it was because the words were too painful, not from any desire to silence the other. They were both quiet for a moment. She struggled to find some way of phrasing 'how are you' that wasn't insulting.

"Have you been— injured?" she finally managed. God, of course he'd been injured, she didn't know how he was still functioning, but—

"Not to speak of."

Ah. So, probably no broken bones or bullets, but anything else was still a possibility.

"Will you come back with Wyatt?" she blurted. "Come home with Wyatt?"

He breathed out slowly. "That's the plan."

"Good," she managed, voice shaky with relief.

What could she say? Was _when they cut you, I feel it?_ the same as _I love you?_ Did _I'm so sorry_ have any meaning at all? Was he furious over— what they'd done? Would he forgive her?

She could accept that he wouldn't if she could just stop him from _hurting_ like this. But she couldn't.

"Garcia, I'm so sorry," she said, again, because words were frankly insufficient right now but they were all she had. This time he let her get it out.

"Yes." His reply was barely audible, and after a long silence.

They didn't stay on the line much longer; she let him be the one to hang up, though, because he seemed... to be getting something from the non-conversation. She took Wyatt's phone out to him, feeling like she wanted to murder all of Rittenhouse with her bare hands, down most of a bottle of vodka, and then sleep for a month, in about that order.

He took one look at her face, got up, and put his arms around her. One reason on the very long list of reasons she was glad they'd repaired their friendship: the hugs.

"Hey," he said. "It's gonna be okay." He hesitated. "I'll bring him back."

Lucy nearly laughed. Then she pulled back. "Uh, no, bring _both_ of you back."

That got her a crooked smirk. "Yes, ma'am."

"And if you see my biological father? Kill him."

Wyatt studied her face carefully. "You sure about that?"

She looked back at him.

"... okay."

#

"Any time now, Flynn," Wyatt muttered.

He was creeping through the pine forest where Flynn had set their rendezvous. Wyatt had already checked the coordinates. He'd also already considered that this could be a trap.

It probably wasn't. But what if Zagreb had finally made Flynn snap, made him swear to get revenge on the team? On Wyatt specifically, because he'd been the one to pull that trigger?

Even Wyatt couldn't really see it.

But he could _definitely_ see Flynn letting him wander around the dark woods just to be a d—

Something huge dropped out of a tree in front of him. Wyatt snapped his gun up and nearly shot it before recognizing it.

Him.

He bit back the first thing he wanted to say, which was _Christ, Flynn, what the hell is_ wrong _with you_ , and the second, which was, _you're playing Batman now?_ once he got a good luck at the guy, because Flynn frankly looked like shit.

Wyatt settled for a sharp look. "Any change?"

"No movement in or out. Can't tell about the Mothership."

"Rufus is monitoring. He'll let us know if they jump." And if they did—

If they did, the time team didn't have any soldiers with them.

"C'mon," Wyatt added. "You can brief the Homeland Security team."

Flynn had spotted a narrow gap in the camera coverage on the edge of the property. They decided he and Wyatt would go in first, with open comms. Once they met resistance, the team Agent Christopher had sent would storm the place from the other side and head straight for the Mothership. The tech trio, Connor, Rufus, and Jiya, hadn't been able to get working a prototype that would hold the Mothership in place. Apparently the problem was that it would require something like a tractor trailer full of generators to work for even a few seconds.

But they had improvised a something doohickey that was supposed to scramble the Mothership's navigation if they could actually get it close enough. They'd only been able to build one. Agent Zalbriwy, leading the Homeland Security team, had it.

Wyatt handed Flynn a bulletproof vest. Flynn looked at it blankly.

"You're wearing that," Wyatt said. "I told Lucy I was bringing you home, and I didn't mean in a body bag."

That got a flicker of emotion out of Flynn, the first Wyatt had really seen, but he didn't care enough to try to puzzle out what exactly it was. Didn't have time.

"Got a gun for you, too," Wyatt added.

Wyatt had never actually seen Flynn use a modern rifle before, and hadn't seen him carry one in, oh, fifteen years. In the vest, with the rifle, he looked a lot like the man Wyatt had glimpsed at that little outpost outside Kabul. God, those fifteen years had done a number on them both.

It pained him, but Wyatt let Flynn take point on the infiltration: he'd been watching this place for two days, and he knew it better than Wyatt did. They stayed low, and crept forward.

Wyatt thought of Grace. If he died here...

If he died here, she'd be looked after, but Wyatt didn't want her raised by the grandparents who'd traded their daughter to Rittenhouse.

If he got out of here, Wyatt decided, he was asking Lucy about becoming Grace's— something. Emergency guardian in case of death. Whatever. Becoming Grace's _person_ . Because she might not know anything about kids, but Wyatt knew that if she were suddenly responsible for one, she'd stop at nothing to _be responsible_ . And Lucy's version of _stop at nothing_ was... damn impressive.

The building was visible ahead through the thinning trees. On the edge of the open space was what looked like a small dumpster, which meant there'd be a road or a path nearby. They reached it—

Flynn stiffened, slipped under the lid of the dumpster, and held it open. Wyatt didn't hear or see anything— but he had to trust—

He followed Flynn into the dumpster.

He grabbed the side to keep himself from falling noisily, as Flynn silently lowered the lid— almost onto his hands, thanks for that, Flynn. Wyatt dropped into a knee-deep pile of stinky bags. Could've been worse. Could've been _a lot_ worse.

Now he heard the footsteps. Slow, even, one set: someone patrolling.

Wyatt waited.

He'd learned pretty quick that nerves did no good. The threat happened or it didn't, and how you _felt_ didn't matter except that it distracted you.

The footsteps passed.

The two of them waited until the patroller had passed, then slipped out again.

"Hey!"

Flynn dove forward, Wyatt ducked back, and bullets hit the dirt where they'd both just been. Flynn had shit cover— the goons firing knew it—

Flynn was too good to glance in Wyatt's direction, but he had to be wondering—

And, _there_. The man in back got overconfident, stepped into Wyatt's line of fire, and he killed them both with two quick bursts.

Flynn got up, brushed himself off, and gave Wyatt a quick nod. "They'll have heard that."

"Yeah," Wyatt said. "Let's go."

Flynn covered him as he darted across the remaining open space to the side of the building, flattened himself under the eaves, and got the door open in two quick blows. Clearly not a custom-made compound, or that would've been harder. Maybe they'd get lucky and this one wouldn't be wired with explosives.

There was only one room tall enough to hold the Mothership, and Flynn thought it was diagonal across the block of rooms in front of them. Wyatt took point, hugging the wall. He heard shouting and shooting, but most of it was from the other side of the building. Zalbriwy's guys might've gotten in there quick enough that Wyatt and Flynn went—

The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He started to turn, but as the door he'd just passed opened, he knew he wouldn't make it in time. He dropped—

Two soft shots, and the man in the suit fell to the ground.

Wyatt glanced at Flynn. He started to get up, reached down, took the man's earpiece, and slipped it in his own ear.

"—north door," someone was saying. "Perimeter breach."

"We've got a clear line to the exit," another man said. "We'll circle around outside and take them from behind."

"Careful. They might've left a rear guard."

Rittenhouse didn't know for sure, thanks to Wyatt and Flynn systematically shooting out every camera they saw. Press on to the Mothership and risk letting these dicks get behind them, or deal with them now and maybe give the Mothership time to escape?

Wyatt caught Flynn's eye, touched his ear, and tilted his head back the way they'd come.

They waited on either side of the doorway. A rifle eased its way through—

Wyatt let the owner get two steps inside, grabbed the rifle, and jammed the butt into the man's gut. He staggered back. Wyatt ducked a shot from someone outside, and that bullet finished off the first guy. Flynn was grappling with someone— two someones— the next guy through the door, Wyatt wrestled with, trying to keep his rifle down while he used the guy as a human shield.

The man shoved him straight back against the wall. Wyatt saw stars. He ducked under the next blow and blocked the next, grabbing the guy's arm and leveraging him backwards. Someone else rushed the door—

Wyatt set his back foot and pushed his opponent straight into the new arrival, then shot them both as they tried to get untangled. He glanced up just as Flynn broke his second opponent's neck. The guy on the floor got up— Flynn kicked his gun from his hand and shot him.

He and Flynn both dove backwards as gunfire raked the door, coming in high. Wyatt was expecting another goon to sneak through under that cover— he opened fire, keeping the guy from coming through—

Flynn was shooting too, face grim, but his shots were going way wide and— what the hell, he was shooting _at Wyatt_ —

Wyatt heard and felt the sound of a body hitting the ground behind him. Oh. Shit, they were being flanked— He turned—

Suddenly Flynn cried out and stopped shooting. He caught Wyatt's eye and shook his head slightly. Wyatt understood and faked his own pained scream.

They waited.

The rifle poked through the door again. It swiveled towards Flynn—

Wyatt shot the guy as soon as his neck came into view. Flynn had already dove forward under the man's line of fire, and he turned that momentum into a roll, shooting back out the doorway as he went. Shooting _up_ — Flynn, too, had noticed the angle of attack.

Wyatt scrambled out of the way of the incoming two hundred pound bowling ball, and they both heard the distinctive _thump_ of a body hitting the ground outside.

"C'mon," Wyatt panted, offering Flynn a hand up. "We gotta get to the Mothership."

His stolen earpiece crackled. "— lost contact with Squad Two."

"Squad Three is heading for the main corridor."

They raced for the intersecting hallway and managed to shoot out its cameras, then continue out of sight before Squad Three arrived. They turned down the next hallway, and got lucky. There was only one camera here, and it was dangling out of its corner.

The intersecting corridor was also empty. They'd missed Squad Three like ships in the night, or something. Ahead was the Mothership bay, and—

"They're climbing in!"

Two men materialized in front of them. Two really big men.

Flynn dove for the bigger of the two, sending him staggering backwards down the hall. Flynn slugged him— and then Wyatt had his own problems.

He dropped to the floor, turning his momentum into a sliding kick that took his guy's legs out from under him. The guy grabbed for Wyatt's own legs as he fell. Wyatt rolled out of the way— the guy snapped off a wild shot—

Wyatt was vaguely aware of the background noise of Flynn and that other guy beating the hell out of each other.

He didn't have room to use his rifle. He tossed it behind him and drew his pistol. The guy clocked Wyatt in the _gut_ — Fuck—

But Wyatt was used to pain.

He forced himself to keep moving, blocked the next blow, and snapped off a shot. This guy wasn't wearing a vest, and he staggered back— Wyatt's second shot killed him.

Flynn's opponent dropped to the ground, very dead, though Wyatt didn't see a bullet hole and hadn't heard another shot. Blood was streaming down Flynn's face, but he was on his feet.

They glanced at each other, then kept going.

They sprinted through the doors ahead and dove for cover behind some crates. Across the room, some more Rittengoons had some Homeland Security guys pinned down. But they hadn't expected an attack from this direction. Wyatt opened fire as they turned—

Flynn rested his rifle on the top of the crates and started raking the Mothership.

No— he was aiming very specifically, Wyatt realized. He followed Flynn's lead and directed his fire at the same spot, whatever it was. _Come on, come on..._

Something bright sparked— acrid smoke filled the air— and the Mothership was gone.

Damn it! Too much to hope for that they'd blown themselves up in the process.

They dealt with the goons who were now trapped in the middle of the room, and then with Squad Three when they showed up. Then it was mopping up. Wyatt came away with just a graze— an _actual_ graze, not a _you're alive that means I grazed you_ , Flynn. Flynn himself took a solid shot to the chest, leaping over the top of a conference table to get to a guy on the other side before he could destroy Rittenhouse's computers. He'd have an awful bruise, but the vest did its job.

More Homeland Security guys came in to help secure the place. The team hadn't lost anyone, and Wyatt wasn't in charge of them but he was still grateful. He'd lost enough men.

"We couldn't get close enough to use the device, but we saw them board," Zalbriwy reported, bandaging one of his guys. "I recognized Cahill from his file. Four other men, and their pilot. She can't be more than sixteen, if I had to guess."

Wyatt swore. One of the children Emma had taken from Nebraska and trained, obviously. God only knew how this side of Rittenhouse was getting her to fight for them.

He still didn't understand how it hadn't been _supervising kids kidnapped out of time_ that'd finally gotten Jessica to leave.

The forensic-type evidence, Homeland Security would go through, and some of the computer stuff, too. But some of it, their own team could make better sense of any eggheaded analyst. As the agents cataloged each piece, scanned it for trackers, and boxed it up, Wyatt and Flynn loaded it into the back of a van.

When he was pretty sure they had all of it, Wyatt eyed Flynn, not sure how much of a fight he'd have to get him in the van. "'m I driving?"

He'd considered staying longer to see what else had turned up, but the sooner they got this stuff to Rufus and Jiya and Connor— and Lucy— the better.

Flynn climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door. By the time Wyatt got behind the wheel, Flynn was already buckled, seat slid _way_ back, feet up on the dash, eyes closed.

Great.

A mile turned into five turned into twenty turned into a hundred. Flynn was deep asleep. Wyatt would've put some money on him basically not sleeping between escaping the base and now.

Only, what, thirteen hundred miles to go? It was gonna be a long drive.

Twelve hundred.

Eleven hundred.

Wyatt's phone buzzed. He immediately pulled off in case it was important. Had Rittenhouse jumped? But no, it was his daily text from Reggie, the agent running security at the compound with the Codys and the Carlins. His text about Grace.

Because they were already stopped, Wyatt took the time to go through every picture. He felt his face soften into a smile as he—

 _Jesus_. Flynn was staring right at him.

Wyatt shoved his phone out of sight. "You hungry?"

Flynn stared at him blankly. "Hungry?" he repeated, like it was a foreign word.

"Okay, we're stopping," Wyatt muttered.

Easier said than done when they were in the middle of the high desert. By the time they stopped at a Denny's in Ontario, just before the Idaho border, and took a booth where Wyatt could watch the van through the window, Wyatt's stomach was just about digesting itself.

Except for giving the waitress his order, Flynn didn't say a damn word.

Wyatt reminded himself of Flynn shooting him. Remembered him kidnapping Lucy, remembered the look on Rufus's face after Capone had shot him. Wyatt reminded himself of all the times Flynn had been an absolute bastard, because if he didn't, sitting here with the man as he stared through the partition behind Wyatt would've been unbearable.

It was less awkward when their food arrived. When the waitress came back to check on them and asked if they needed anything— like dessert— Flynn ordered another cheeseburger. And Wyatt was actively trying not to get emotionally involved, here, but it was really, really easy to imagine Flynn hell-bent on finding Rittenhouse, not stopping to sleep or eat.

Flynn had driven Wyatt crazy with all the times he'd been a sarcastic, sniping shit, and Wyatt was horrified to find he'd give a lot for Flynn to just be a sarcastic, sniping shit again. This was _much_ worse.

They paid and kept going.

"Really?" Wyatt said, as they came up on Boise. "We're gonna go fourteen hundred miles in silence?"

He knew if Flynn had been asleep, that would've woken him. But Wyatt got only silence in return. Fine. Flynn could ignore him.

"What is there to say, Wyatt?" Flynn's voice came out lower and slower than Wyatt had ever heard.

"I'm... sorry," Wyatt said, a few miles later. "I know we— but that was— I'm really sorry."

"Why does everyone in this place keep offering me that meaningless word?"

Oh, God. Wyatt needed— Lucy. Lucy was the person he wanted now, and he recognized the irony, having tried so hard to keep her and Flynn apart. But Flynn didn't even sound angry. Just thoughtful.

Just very, very lost.

They finally stopped for the night in Montpelier, when Wyatt realized how late it was and how tiny the towns were ahead of them. He hadn't expected to have any problem finding rooms here, but there was a marathon in town. He could only get one room.

They hadn't seen anyone suspicious all day, so Wyatt felt okay leaving the evidence in the back of the van. "Here." He dug a stack of clothes out of his duffel and held them out, waiting, until Flynn took them. Lucy had sent them, and he'd agreed to take them mostly for her sake. He didn't know when he'd become willing to help out this Flynn-Lucy _thing_ , but if it made her happy—

If, more specifically, it made her _worry_ less, to have her— whatever— come home in clean clothes and not looking like a hobo, well, Wyatt's duffel was never full anyway.

He didn't know when he'd become willing to help out this Flynn-Lucy thing. He and Lucy hadn't exactly started over, but they'd reset. He hadn't deserved her forgiveness; she'd given it to him anyway, because she was Lucy. He still loved her and always would, until his dying day, and if the part of that love that was _very_ different from what he felt for, say, Rufus, had banked itself, well... he wasn't sure it would take much for that to come roaring back. If he let it.

That lost look on Lucy's face when Flynn had disappeared on her... Wyatt had felt angry and jealous and guilty all at the same time. He'd let Rufus be the one to comfort her, because the last thing she'd needed just then was a fight with him. But that look had made it very, very clear how much Flynn meant to Lucy. And despite Wyatt's wishful thinking back in Florida, that showed no signs of changing. Whatever this was, it was more than a tumble in the sheets for Lucy, clearly.

Besides— Lucy choosing Flynn was enough, full stop, but, the last time she and Wyatt had gotten involved...

He'd thought he'd understood right after Chinatown how bad he'd hurt her. But the damned therapist had made him _think_ about it, dragged it out of him, forced him to admit that, okay, maybe his abject guilt was a fucking defense mechanism. And once Wyatt had had a little distance from that guilt, the weight of it all, including what he'd done to Lucy, had really sunk in.

Maybe that was what love really was. When you wanted someone to be happy even more than you wanted them to choose you.

But Wyatt wasn't pining. If, one day in the future, he and Lucy decided to maybe try again, he'd leap at the chance. And he'd sure as hell do better this time. But what they had now was good, too. He was never again going to take her friendship for granted.

That shrink. Wyatt hadn't talked to her since Florida, since Grace. Having an infant had been an iron-clad excuse at first, and now Wyatt didn't think he really needed it. The shrink would probably disagree. But Wyatt _knew_ he was doing a lot better.

And one other reason for Wyatt not to be throwing up obstacles to Lucy's whatever with Flynn: Besides everything else, there was...

Wyatt winced.

There was Jessica.

Wyatt had meant every word he'd told Lucy in the hospital. He'd known he needed some time to get over the whole clusterfuck, and mourn the loss of _his_ Jessica all over again. He'd also known that whatever closure he got, it wouldn't be from this woman wearing Jess's face.

Then she'd decided to come in, and Wyatt had listened to all of her debriefing. And, trust but verify, sure. But the problem was Agent Christopher _had_ verified a bunch of it— plane tickets going back to the 1990s, for instance. And those damned recordings had made Wyatt think that...

That underneath all the Rittenhouse, a lot of the woman he'd loved was still there.

Flynn came out of the shower, interrupting Wyatt's reverie. He took his own shower. When he got out, Flynn was stretched out on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling.

As far as Wyatt could tell, he spent the night like that.

It reminded Wyatt way too much of Lucy after Rittenhouse'd gotten hold of her.

In the morning Flynn tried to grab the keys. Wyatt snatched them back. "You didn't sleep. I'm driving."

Flynn didn't argue.

It was another long, quiet day. Wyatt considered trying to provoke Flynn out of this... stupor, whatever, because otherwise Flynn was going to take it home to Lucy. He very, very quickly thought better of that idea, though.

That didn't mean they had to ride in complete silence.

"You, uh, spend a lot of time in Texas?" Wyatt tried.

Flynn looked at him.

Wyatt shrugged. "Hey, the radio's not coming in." He hadn't slept enough, and he needed something to help him focus.

When Flynn finally spoke, his voice was slow, and tired. "After my, uh, mother died, I spent a few Christmases and summers with her parents."

"Outside Houston, right?" Wyatt glanced over.

Flynn nodded.

Wyatt hesitated. "She, uh, seemed like a neat lady. Sorry you didn't get more time with her." 1980, Wyatt thought he remembered. Would've put Flynn just about the age Wyatt had been when his own mom died.

He was sincere, but kind of expected a snarl for that one. But, after a pause, he just got another tired nod.

"English and German," he said after an hour or so on the road. "And Croatian, I'm guessing. What else you speak?"

He got silence for a while. "French, Spanish, Russian." Flynn rattled those off like they were obvious. "Arabic. Enough Gorkhali to get by."

And Wyatt thought he'd been doing good with English, German, Spanish, and Arabic. " _Just_ those, huh?"

"Anything else you wanna know?" Flynn added. "Favorite color, lucky lottery numbers, takeout preferences?"

Wyatt snorted. "That how you financed your guys? Lotto winnings?"

"I hit Rittenhouse early on, got away with some of their money and... a cache of intel. And my men got a share of everything we recovered from them." He shrugged. "I think some of them were speculating in the past as well."

He didn't sound concerned about that. Of course not.

"Back in 2014," Flynn said hoarsely a while later.

Wyatt looked sideways carefully.

Flynn hesitated. "... thank you."

Wyatt's eyebrows went up.

"I couldn't," Flynn added, barely audible.

Ah. Yeah. Now Wyatt knew exactly what they were talking about. "You shouldn't've had to."

They were both glad to let that one drop.

"You missed the turn."

Flynn's voice, hours later, startled Wyatt. He'd thought Flynn was asleep again, sleeping through some of the most gorgeous scenery in the country as they crossed the mountains not far from Yellowstone. "What?"

The only turn they'd just passed was the turnoff towards the base where the families were hidden. And Wyatt hadn't intended to stop. Not with Flynn in the car.

Silence. Okay then.

"I told you," Flynn finally said. "See your child whenever you can."

Wyatt winced at the pain in that raw rasp. "We have to get back. The team doesn't have any soldiers if the Mothership jumps, and there might be something important in all these boxes."

Flynn gave him what might have been a disgusted look, but he didn't say anything else.

They stopped mid-afternoon at one of the solar-powered rest stops east of Casper. Wyatt bought a bunch of junk from the vending machine to make up for them not stopping for lunch. Back in the van, he dumped it all in the center console, opened a bag of chips, and offered it to Flynn.

Flynn looked at Wyatt blankly, like this was some bizarre custom he'd never heard of. Wyatt honestly could not tell if this was shellshocked Flynn or just asshole Flynn. After a minute, Flynn took a handful.

After a few minutes of crunching, Wyatt asked, "Why'd you come back?"

Flynn gave him a tired, irritated look. "Because I can't burn Rittenhouse to the ground on my own and I'm tired of trying."

It was the closest Wyatt had ever heard him come to saying he needed the team.

"And because Lucy deserves better than me, but unless and until she agrees, she also deserves better than my vanishing out of her life like that."

Wyatt winced.

"Don't ask questions you're not willing to hear the answers to, Wyatt."

How much of that wince was the obvious, and how much was the reminder of what Wyatt had done? Wyatt definitely wasn't interested in dissecting that for Flynn, anyway.

"You and Lucy," he said after a minute.

"No."

"What?"

"Mind your own damn business, Wyatt."

Wyatt shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, not too long ago I wanted to slug you—"

"What do you _want_ from me?" Flynn snapped.

The outburst startled Wyatt, as did the way Flynn's voice cracked. But Wyatt had momentarily forgotten just how exhausted Flynn was, in more ways than one.

Wyatt hesitated over this one for a long time. But— he really cared about Lucy, and even _Flynn_ didn't deserve what Rittenhouse had done to him. Finally Wyatt asked, "Can I help?"

Flynn snorted. "No."

"I... owe you for Grace," Wyatt admitted. "So... tell me if that changes."

Flynn closed his eyes.

"Because, yeah, we've tried to kill each other. But... Lucy, Rufus, Jiya, Connor. Even Agent Christopher. They all ended up in this war by accident. You and me? We know what it's like to go off to fight on purpose."

"Don't hold your breath," Flynn muttered.

Great. Fine. Wyatt had made the attempt. He started the van.

"But, ah," Flynn added. He hesitated. "Noted."

#

She tried to stay close to Rufus without smothering him.

She still didn't believe it all the time. Sometimes she woke having forgotten, and got the profound relief of remembering all over again. But even when she did believe, she'd never take this, _him_ , for granted. So why not make the most of their time?

This afternoon, though, she'd recognized she _was_ hovering, which was bad for both of them on so many levels. So she stepped into the living room to reset her haywire emotions and remind herself she could let him out of her sight.

After a few minutes, he came after her. "Hey," he said gently. He slid his arms around her from behind. She leaned against him, and breathed in his scent.

"I'll get over this," she muttered. "By, you know, our tenth anniversary or something."

He kissed her temple.

"So," she said more brightly after a minute. But she didn't pull away. "Any luck?"

"No. There's just too much variability in the waveforms to get it down below about 30 miles. If we could get out there, though... we might be able to find the Mothership. The energy signature has turned... weird."

Jiya turned to look at him. "Malfunctioning, or Rittenhouse up to more dirty tricks?"

"Malfunctioning."

That made sense. Wyatt had reported strafing it as it escaped. But the thought of Rittenhouse with a _malfunctioning_ time machine...

"So what kind of wedding do you want?" Rufus asked after a few minutes.

Jiya welcomed the lighthearted distraction. They'd never talked about that, had they? And, Jiya realized, she'd never _thought_ about it. "The kind where I marry you. That's all I care about. What about you?"

"I want my mom and brother there. And your mom, if... you and she want that. And our friends."

"Right."

"I don't want anything complicated."

"No."

"I want puns."

Of course he wanted puns. "Just promise me they'll be better than the other night."

"What other night?"

"'Down for several hours of maintenance?'" she quoted.

"In my own defense," he said after a minute, "we had just basically shorted out my brain."

She leaned up and kissed him, happy to take her share of the credit for that.

"And I want to wear a Boba Fett costume," he added.

"Fine."

He looked down at her. "You're serious. I actually was not."

"I told you." She kissed him again, slowly and thoroughly. "I just want _you_."

She was just considering asking him to take her back to bed, Lifeboat work be damned, when a car door slammed outside. Jiya turned quickly. Wyatt had just climbed out of the van—

Lucy appeared and basically beamed herself outside.

She gave Wyatt a fierce hug. Then she turned more slowly to the passenger seat as Flynn climbed out.

Rufus made a pained noise. "Wow, he is... not all right."

Jiya knew that what they'd had to do in 2014 was eating Rufus up. She'd talked through it with him, twice, but she knew it wasn't the kind of thing you just got over. Not for anyone, and definitely not for a man like Rufus.

"He came back, though," she pointed out, as Lucy and Flynn stared at each other until Jiya half-expected Lucy to put her fingertips on Flynn's face and just start a mind meld.

"Of course he came back. The Lifeboat's here. And... Lucy."

Jiya, remembering how she'd slowly, reluctantly gotten to know Flynn better in those months when Rufus was gone, wasn't so sure that was the only explanation.

"I'm gonna help with the boxes," Rufus added, and slid past her to join Wyatt at the back of the van.

It didn't take the five of them working together very long to unload. Wyatt directed them to put some of the boxes in the Lifeboat garage, and some in the living room. "Tech stuff and history stuff," he explained.

"Then what's that?" Jiya gestured at the remaining three boxes. The one on top had come open, and was full of fabric.

"Oh, those are Rittenhouse's costumes. Thought we might be able to use them."

"Where's the Mothership now?" Flynn demanded.

"Northern California," Jiya told him.

"Back in the Bay Area?"

She shook her head. "Somewhere in the mountains outside Redding."

"A Rittenhouse stronghold in a land of libertarian secessionist wackos?" Wyatt asked. "Why does that not surprise me?"

"It's damaged," Rufus added. "I don't know if they'll even be able to take off again without some serious repairs."

"So we have a window to find them," Wyatt said. "Agent Christopher's people are going through everything we found at the Astoria base. Maybe there'll be something linking them to somewhere specific. Flynn? You ever hear about anything there?"

Flynn shook his head. Right now he looked a lot more like the dangerous and driven man who'd broken into Mason Industries than the teammate she knew.

"There's a chance we might be able to find the Mothership if we actually jump the Lifeboat out there," Rufus said.

Wyatt looked at him. "And you've never mentioned this _before?_ "

Flynn's intense expression echoed Wyatt's.

"Yeah, well, until you two shot up the Mothership, it wasn't really an option. But now its energy signature has changed, and—"

"Wait," Lucy said. "The energy signature of the time machine that has a plutonium core in it?"

Everyone looked at Flynn.

"I'm like ninety... eight? Percent sure that's not relevant here," Rufus said after a minute. "But if we get close enough, like within a few miles, the Mothership's signature might resonate with the Lifeboat."

"On the downside," Jiya added, "we'd be out in the middle of the Klamath Mountains without any way to recharge, and with no way to tell Homeland Security where to meet us ahead of time."

More silence.

"That can be a backup plan," Wyatt said firmly. "Lucy—"

"Check their historical notes. On it." Lucy glanced at Flynn, but he didn't say anything.

#

No one mentioned Zagreb in front of Garcia. Lucy didn't think anyone knew what to say. _I'm sorry? Thanks for saving the world at a horrific personal cost? Are you okay?_ All really stupid options.

In the first box of Rittenhouse stuff, she found history books that she'd have to scrutinize carefully for hints of their plans, archive printouts referring to obscure places and people she'd have to identify, and a battered, bloodstained diary. She frowned at it, almost afraid to open it in case it turned out to be...

It was not her handwriting.

She flipped through it quickly: it was written by a John Smith, but not that one, because it began shortly before the nineteenth century. She put it aside for later.

Garcia came in, got his pajamas out, and stared at them like they were completely strange to him.

Lucy politely averted her eyes, and heard a few moments of rustling clothes. When she looked up again, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at his hands.

She sat down on her own bed, and took his hands.

Slowly, he looked up.

"Lorena never would've traded millions of lives for herself and Iris," he said slowly, barely above a whisper. "But there should've been another way." He shook his head. "It didn't... _work_."

After a moment, Lucy got it. "Maybe Rittenhouse..." She swallowed. "Maybe we were sloppy, and they saw us and moved up their time table. Maybe they caught all of you at home. Maybe—"

"Maybe I decided protecting my family was more important than fighting some nebulous enemy I'd never met."

"Maybe," Lucy agreed quietly.

His hands tightened on hers. "I thought... I knew that they couldn't come back."

But to have that so vividly, horribly demonstrated— to know that those moments on the balcony had, truly, been the last ones—

"And I did it _myself_ ," he added. "I— Lucy, they went for Iris _first_ . That night. That was who they _are_. And I was there, twice, and I— didn't—"

She moved across the narrow aisle to sit beside him. "Don't blame yourself for Rittenhouse's trap, Garcia. They're monsters."

He _looked_ at her, bleak and broken.

Her eyes prickled. "There's no roadmap for this," she whispered. "You tried. You've tried for three years, because you didn't think time should stand in your way. And—" She shook her head, blinking back tears. "Garcia, if I could make that enough—"

He frowned down at her. She didn't know what she'd said until he said, "Promise me you're not gonna run off after David Rittenhouse."

She breathed in sharply. "Don't ask me that."

"Lucy—"

"Because if I make that promise to you, I'll keep it."

" _I know_ , that's why I'm asking!"

"Garcia—"

"What, you're the only one who gets to ask hard things? You were willing to ask me to sacrifice my family, back there by the Lifeboat, but I can't ask you not to sacrifice yourself?"

"You're asking me to live with—"

"With what?" he asked. "With the things you've seen? With feeling like you don't deserve to have survived? With knowing there were others you could have saved? What exactly am I asking you to bear alone, Lucy?"

She stared at him. _... oh_.

He reached out and very gently cupped the side of her face, watching her intently. "No more human sacrifices, Lucy," he said softly. "Not any more."

She breathed out slowly. "Okay."

The word tasted bitter.

#

Lucy had suggested he sleep, astutely guessing he... hadn't been. She'd stretched out behind him in the familiar bunk, the warmth of her against his back a welcome antidote to the cold sickness he seemed to feel everywhere else. He'd closed his eyes and tried not to break, and noticed that his pillow smelled like her.

He woke, and it was clear that for all the war had done to her, in some ways, Lucy was still naive. He did not feel better at all.

They were gone. They were really gone this time, and what did he have now that he hadn't had in São Paulo?

He wasn't alone. But he hadn't yet wiped these monsters from the earth.

... but he wasn't alone.

It seemed impossible that, what, two weeks ago, he'd been detached enough to accept that they were never coming back. The memory of that burned him. How could he have let them go like that?

_What other choice do I have?_

He got up and joined the hunt. Agent Christopher had sent some financial data from the computers at the raided base for him to look at, and Lucy always welcomed his help looking through historical material. The job. He had to focus on finding these bastards and killing every last one of them. To avenge his family.

Some exhausted part of him pointed out that Lorena would much rather have him make sure Rittenhouse couldn't do this to anyone else, than avenge her. But if he listened to that exhausted part, he might lose this anger he was clinging to as a shield, and anyway, it amounted to the same thing.

He had an unpleasant interview when Agent Christopher arrived that evening, but he preferred her displeasure to her _pity_ any day, so he was grateful for that. He pushed himself until his eyes blurred, kept himself together through the night, and got up early the next day to begin anew.

That evening, he finished the financials and made his list of targets. Homeland Security would check them now. He got up to go find Lucy and see what she—

He found himself staring at the Lifeboat.

He reached out and touched the cold metal. The damned _time machine_ taunting him with his failure, with its very presence.

 _Why_ had he failed? Why had his past self, _he_ , fucked up his one chance to save Lorena and Iris from a terrible and undeserved death and yet not condemn the world to Rittenhouse's horrifying rule?

Why had God made his girls so dependent on someone who wasn't good enough? Why had he punished _them_ for _Garcia's_ inadequacies?

Why...

Why had God put them in this situation at all?

He felt a fury building behind his eyes like he hadn't felt in a long time.

"Uh, Flynn, are you—"

Garcia's head snapped up.

Rufus's eyes widened. "... that's a no."

Rufus went away. That was all Garcia paid enough attention to know. Mason had gone, too. He was alone in the bay—

Someone shut the door.

"Why?" Garcia heard himself growl, though it didn't sound like himself at all. " _WHY!_ "

He hit the damn machine, knowing he couldn't hurt the metal with his fist, relishing the sting because the opposite was very much true.

He wasn't sure of all the words clawing out of his throat. He found himself snarling, "Was her devotion not _enough?_ WAS IT NOT ENOUGH!"

Had God punished her for loving a killer? Iris, for being born to one?

_Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation._

"DAMN YOU!" He poured out a torrent of blasphemies, hitting the Lifeboat again and again, his throat aching with rage and shouting and tears. He raged in his father's language, dredging up the worst he could possibly say and throwing it against an indifferent, uncaring... _nothing_.

Always before, ever since São Paulo, there'd been the hope. Even after he'd realized that night was a chokepoint, there'd been the feeling of a road left untaken, _there_ , if blocked off.

Now there was nothing. Nothing left.

He stumbled away from the machine and sank to his knees, spitting out what words he didn't know. He knew deep down the worst of it: this impotent rage had a feeling of relentless finality. A... letting-go.

He looked up—

Horror and shame flooded him, seeing Lucy sitting calmly on the top step leading into the house. When had she— how long— he hadn't heard the door since—

Oh, God, she'd been there the whole time.

Why the hell had she _stayed?_

He tried to shrink back from her gaze, but she didn't let him. She got up and came towards him, watching him with a quiet relentless compassion. She knelt beside him, and he crumbled.

He sobbed because his girls had deserved better. Because he'd failed them. Because they'd suffered for _his_ sins, and because they were gone forever. Because sometimes their absence ached so much he couldn't bear it, and other times he could, which was worse. Because the man they'd known had died beside them that night. Because he now had to live the rest of his life with the man he'd become instead, knowing that he'd sacrificed himself for them and still come up short. Because he didn't know when this hated war would end, and because when it did, if he survived, he had nothing.

But most of all, because he loved them.

He shuddered to a stop, finally.

He breathed.

He drifted, mercifully half-aware.

The quiet _click_ of the door closing slowly brought him back to himself. He felt the cold, hard garage floor under him, and the fabric of Lucy's pants under his cheek.

"I'm the designated UN observer sent by the four other really freaked out people in this house," Agent Christopher said softly. "Silence seemed like a good time to check on you. Wyatt's practically climbing the walls," she added drily.

Lucy's hand tightened a little in his hair. "We're fine," Lucy whispered.

He heard Agent Christopher come closer. "Is he going to be all right?"

She sounded concerned. They thought, he realized, distantly, he was asleep.

"I think he will be now," Lucy replied.

A pause. "Do you need anything?"

"A blanket, a book, and a couple of glasses of water."

The damp cloth against his face, and the knowledge that Lucy was willing to settle in for the long run, together finally made him stir. Oh, God. That had felt so cataclysmic, and yet, on the other side, life just had to go on.

He turned his head. "Messed— messed up your pants," he managed. He'd turned them into an embarrassingly wet snotty wreck, in fact.

Lucy looked down at him, her gaze pained and fond together. "Yeah, that's definitely what I was worried about."

He snorted, and stared up at her, wondering at her presence. If he didn't stop looking at her like this— Agent Christopher would know— but—

To hell with it. Agent Christopher already knew. Whatever there was to know.

Lucy ran her hand over his hair, watching him with such concern it threatened to undo him all over again. She was the only one he could tolerate that from, because he knew that if she hadn't been in this exact position, it was a difference of kind, not degree.

It took a lot to push himself to sitting. He felt, frankly, hungover. And humiliated. And empty, but grateful not—

not to be alone.

He tried to think of something to say. He tried to think of some way to deflect from everything he'd just done. But he was too... tired.

He lurched to his knees. Lucy stood much more gracefully, and offered him her hands. He would pull her off her feet if he put any serious weight on her. But he took her hands nonetheless to let her steady him. He stayed like that a moment and just looked up at her, and then let her help him up.

He found himself sitting on the edge of his bed, still feeling shellshocked, embarrassed, but mostly... numb. Lucy had just left. He heard her voice across the hall:

"Mind sparing a little of your stash?"

"... come in, I'll get you a glass," Mason said. "I'll make it a double, you look like you could use it."

"I want something so that Garcia sleeps," Lucy clarified.

"Ah."

She returned a moment later with a bottle of vodka and a glass. He poured himself a generous measure and downed it in one go. After the extended up-close view of his father's failings that had been his childhood, Garcia could count on one hand the number of nights in his life he'd used this kind of temporary anesthetic. But tonight would be one of them.

Sleep, when it came, was deep and mercifully dreamless.

#

The Mothership didn't jump. Jiya didn't let herself hope this war was over for good. That would be too painful. But from Wyatt's and Flynn's descriptions of what they'd done to it, she, Rufus and Connor got a pretty good idea of the damage. If they were right, the plutonium core wasn't involved—

— but still, thanks for that, Flynn.

Equally important, if they were right, they had a good idea of the parts and the expertise Rittenhouse would need to fix it. None of them thought Emma was cooperating with the Cahills, not after Jessica's description of the split in Rittenhouse after Chinatown. So some of Connor's former employees would be Rittenhouse's next best bet, and Homeland Security was watching them. If Rittenhouse could get the parts and the people, Denise's own people could find them. If not, the Mothership was probably stranded.

Jiya rubbed her temples. She'd never gotten headaches like this before. Was it another symptom of her visions, or was she just working harder than she had even in college and at Mason Industries?

Rufus, returning from the kitchen with three— three?— fresh mugs of coffee, put one in front of her and kissed the top of her head. She gave him a grateful smile. He put a second in front of Flynn— without the kiss, this time— and took the third to his own seat.

Rufus didn't see Flynn raise his head and give him a blank look, but Jiya did. Flynn sniffed it surreptitiously, then took a cautious sip. Jiya hid a smile.

Flynn was quiet, grim, _tired_... but he wasn't shutting himself away. Sometimes he sat in his and Lucy's bedroom for an hour or two, but other times he'd take his work— helping Lucy go through Rittenhouse's historical clues— into the living room, or into the Lifeboat bay. Nearby, if not actively involved.

Jiya privately thought he was just lonely for some damned human comfort. She remembered that feeling from her three years in the past.

Jiya calibrated her own worry by Lucy's. Lucy looked sad, but not— well, Flynn looked like he'd lost something that had been haunting him, and in a strange way, so did Lucy.

And none of them had talked about it, but somehow, there was usually someone in the room with him, minding their own business, quietly doing their own work. Flynn had to have noticed— he'd been an NSA agent— but they somehow all knew they wouldn't be rebuffed with his customary sarcasm.

They'd... all heard him break. The house wasn't _that_ big, to muffle that ferocious grief. It was really, really hard to hold any grudges after that.

Jiya turned her attention to her coffee and her boyfriend. He looked up from the screens of diagnostics he was scrolling through, reached out, and took her hand, his fingers warm and oh-so-familiar. She smiled. After a moment or two, she brought his hand to her mouth and gently kissed his knuckles.

"Sometimes I think someone should write a sonnet about the two of you," Connor said from the doorway.

"I hope you're not volunteering," Rufus muttered. "Because I was there for that company poetry slam night, Connor. It is _seared_ in my memory."

"'Shall I compare thee—'"

"No," Jiya and Rufus chorused.

Connor put on his look of _I am a tragically underappreciated genius_ and joined them at the consoles. "Any luck?"

"I just finished debugging the simulation of the Mothership's expected resonance in mountains with the composition of the Klamaths," Jiya said. "It's running now."

"And I'm going through all those old malfunction logs we recovered from the off-site backups," Rufus added. "From the early trips. Translating them into something I can feed into the diagnostic software to see if I come up with any signals we're getting from the Mothership."

"Excellent." Connor sat down and opened up what looked like a parts list.

The simulation passed the point when it would have crashed if it were going to. Jiya got up and took her empty coffee cup into the kitchen for a refill and some real food. She took her plate into the living room and stared out the window.

The prairie grass was fading to shades of brown and gold and tan. The nights were getting longer. Soon the falling temperature would give her added incentive to snuggle up against Rufus at night... as if she _needed_ more incentive.

Chronologically speaking, they'd passed the year mark of this fight sometime last month, but it had been a lot longer for her. At times like this, it was hard to imagine it would ever be over. It was even harder to imagine going back to a normal life afterwards. And not just for them. Kevin, Rufus's brother, had had to drop out of the fall semester. All three of the Codys would have long since lost their jobs. Would Grace Logan get old enough in that bunker that she'd remember it later?

"Flynn." Wyatt stood in the Lifeboat bay doorway, his back to Jiya. "I could use a sparring partner. You in?"

Jiya didn't catch Flynn's answer, but it was longer than _yes_ or _no_.

"Don't be so hard on yourself." From Wyatt's tone, she could picture the smirk. "Some days you actually give me a half-decent workout."

Jiya, having seen the two of them very evenly matched, didn't bother to muffle her snort.

But it worked. Flynn went to his room to change. Jiya went back into the Lifeboat bay. She sat beside Rufus, and looked through the first results of the sims. "We were _way_ off," she muttered.

Rufus looked over her shoulder. "Well, knowing should help us find them."

She wrapped her free arm around his waist as she kept scrolling. She had him back; the rest was detail. But maybe she was greedy, because she wanted to dream that one day the war ended and they could try to piece together a normal life.

She let herself lean against him. She'd gotten him back, even though the seeming insurmountability of that task had driven her to despair so many times. They'd finish this damn thing, one step at a time.

Together.

#

Garcia had shown her how much a quiet, steady presence could mean when you were hurting. So, even though she doubted she could be nearly as effective as he was, she stayed with him.

He'd told her before Zagreb that he didn't think he could ever bring Lorena and Iris back, but thinking or even accepting that, and being forced to prove it to himself in the cruelest way imaginable, were two very different things. Seeing Lorena and Iris, then having them ripped away...

He was... not as bad, now, after days of slowly putting himself back together. The shock and violent grief had faded into a deep sadness, which was slowly fading into something else. But the bitterness was gone from him. Lucy didn't know how that had happened. Maybe it had been seeing that their deaths, and the terrible things he'd done, hadn't been for nothing.

She wasn't the only one who stayed with him. Lucy was still waiting for Garcia to notice the team had closed ranks around him.

The two of them worked steadily through Rittenhouse's papers, making a list of their likely targets. An article on the Great Chicago Fire could be a lot of people, but together with a map of early 19 th  century Cork... Mary Jones, maybe?

"Whoever did this, it wasn't my mother, that's for sure," she muttered. "Maybe they don't have any historians left."

"Central Point, Virginia," Garcia said after a few minutes. "Tax records and a family tree of Byrds and Jeters. Interracial marriage?"

"Sounds like it."

After a few minutes, she straightened up. "I need a break. Want to help me with something?"

"What?"

"I want to go through those clothes and see what eras they're from. Might give us some more clues."

Garcia did not look particularly enticed.

"And it'll save us some scrambling next time the Mothership jumps," Lucy said. "If we're going through them we might as well sort them by year and size."

The clothes, the papers, and that battered diary were the items under her purview. Lucy still didn't know why that last one interested Rittenhouse. So far it was just an account of building a cabin, clearing land, planting, and harvesting crops. It was a remarkably well-written one, though, by a man with a wry sense of humor who'd clearly gotten an education at some point.

The clothes were more interesting, though not particularly informative about the periods Rittenhouse was targeting. Lucy geeked out over the various materials and cuts and the class distinctions and regional variations for a while before she realized she was doing it. "Uh... got a little carried away there."

If Garcia didn't manage a smile, the look he gave her was soft. "I always enjoy your professional opinions, Lucy."

"Really?"

He just looked at her, and let that be his answer.

She started using that battered diary as bedtime reading. She absolutely loved having a new primary source to explore; that had been one of the things that hooked her on history as a teenager, the fact that you could almost reach across the centuries and meet someone on their own terms. This one, though, she was afraid of what she'd learn.

John courted a woman named Susannah from another settlement, married her, and began raising a family with her. Lucy smiled over the astonished gratitude that came through his words, and at the clear joy in his description of their first-born, a little girl. If she had to guess, she'd say that he'd been very, very lonely at some point in his past. He poured out his thankfulness to God in a passage remarkable both for its unusual fluidity of composition, and for showing he was classically educated. But despite that, he was very down-to-earth, and Lucy thought she would have liked him.

The next few days passed like that. The nights when she woke and didn't hear the very slow, steady breathing that meant Garcia was asleep, she'd quietly slip out of her bed and into his, to just _be there_ as they both tried to sleep.

They figured out that a yellowed map of Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania, a place that didn't exist any more, probably meant Ida Tarbell. Oh, God, that would be awful. It was all awful. Meanwhile, in John's diary, the Smith family slowly grew, despite several miscarriages. John planted his crops and harvested, shot game that was already becoming scarcer on the frontier, expanded their cabin, fought with Susannah over his refusal to keep a pocket watch, and generally doted on his family, as much as a settler living on the frontier at the turn of the 19 th  century could.

"Newspaper clippings from Topeka, summer of 1950," Garcia said. "The social section. NAACP leaders, I think."

"Brown v. Board of Education," Lucy guessed.

She didn't know what was worse: feeling surprised and sickened every time she discovered a new corner of Rittenhouse's evil, or knowing she was becoming numb to it.

Garcia was reading that night when she came to bed. She picked up the Smith diary again. Susannah had a stillborn baby and was slow to recover. Lucy winced at the description of authentic 19 th  century medicine. John, to pay the doctor's bills, finally agreed to repair a neighbor's clock. He and Susannah fought over this lucrative skill he absolutely refused to use otherwise— he wouldn't even let _their_ one clock be—

Lucy sat bolt upright. "This is John Rittenhouse's journal," she said in disbelief.

Garcia looked over at her. "How can anything those dicks do still surprise you?" he bit out.

"No, you don't understand, this is the journal of a man who settled the frontier and lived there for— ten, fifteen years so far, a hard, unassuming life, but it's _him_." She flipped pages rapidly. "So if he fled and never looked back, how did David Rittenhouse's descendants—" She shook her head. "You weren't in a listening mood at the time," she said with a pointed look, "but I remember thinking when you dragged me aboard the Mothership that we had no way of knowing how many other children David Rittenhouse had." She turned to the end.

"He probably got tired of living a hard, unassuming life, and went back to the wealth and power he'd..." Garcia trailed off. "Lucy?"

Slowly, she began to read, tears in her eyes: "'They took the children four days ago. Susannah survived her wounds long enough to tell the tale. The settlement blames the Indians, but I know the truth. She described whites, and I had an account last week of well-dressed men from New York asking after a man named John.'"

"'We should have gone west when the new frontier opened. I knew it at the time, but I dared to hope that after so many years, I was finally free of them. This is our just punishment for my having indulged our comfort.'"

"'It is my duty as a Christian to keep the town from rising up in slaughter, but may God forgive me, because it is my duty as a father to—'" Her voice broke. "'Rescue my children. The local Mingo chief sent a tracker with me, one of his sons I believe. He is anxious this not turn to open war against his band.'"

"'They cannot be far ahead of us now.'"

The rest of the journal was blank. Garcia looked as startled and somber as she felt.

"I think I know what happened to him," she added. "The Double Grave."

"What?"

"They were building a shopping mall in eastern Ohio when they unearthed a 19 th  century grave. The unusual thing was there were two men buried in it, a white man in his forties, and a Native man in his teens. Both killed by bullets, but not from the kind of guns either were carrying. Historians have tried to explain it ever since. It fits."

They looked at each other.

"You were right, Lucy," Garcia said slowly, as if it cost him something. "When you said John could change."

She shook her head again. "Really not in the mood to say I told you so right now."

But knowing she'd had some decent ancestors after all felt like the lifting of a weight. She tried not to let her family tree haunt her, because the idea that blood was destiny was all Rittenhouse— look how far they'd gone to get John's descendants back. She didn't believe it; she knew Henry Wallace had been her real father. But knowing you came from a family of sociopathic cultists on both sides wasn't easy. Maybe... maybe there were more people who'd fought it than she'd thought. People like John, and her grandfather.

"You saved me that night," Garcia said bluntly, pulling her out of her thoughts.

"I know."

"I'm... sorry, Lucy."

"I know." She watched him. "I forgave you a long time ago, Garcia. For all of it. Even for Amy."

He closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. Had he truly not known?

She had a particularly bad dream that night, about John Rittenhouse and his father and Amy and— and she woke with a shock of relief.

She lay still a moment. The moon came in brightly through the window, reassuring her as she anchored herself to this time and place.

She didn't need to turn to Garcia for comfort. She'd learned to take the horrors of her dreams. But— she _wanted_ to, for companionship.

He was stretched out on his back, hair over his eyes, mouth slightly open. She perched on the edge of his bed, then lay down beside him when he made a sleepy, interrogative noise. Half asleep, he shifted over to give her a little more room. She rested against his side.

She felt him look down at her. "Lucy?"

"Mm-hmm."

He hesitated, then rolled onto his side to face her.

Gently, she brushed his hair out of his face. She stroked her fingertips across his frown lines and his laugh lines— a history of suffering and survival written in his skin. Once he'd joined the bunker, the frown lines had slowly eased— until Zagreb.

He closed his eyes, and relaxed under her touch, sinking deeper into the mattress. She cupped his cheek in her hand. He turned his head into her palm.

She wanted— oh, so much. For him, and with him, and from him. Maybe this was still the wrong time, maybe—

But the look on his face was not the ache of longing for something or someone not there. It was... relief.

Maybe she could trust him to tell her.

"Garcia?" she whispered.

He opened his eyes.

She hesitated, started to lean in, stopped. "Do you— Can I—"

His eyes widened. The way he glanced down at her mouth sent a rush of heat through her. He licked his top lip, and nodded.

She leaned in and kissed him oh so gently, her lips soft and slow against his. His breath stuttered.

When she pulled back, he was looking at her so sadly—

Her heart sank. "You don't have to say anything," she whispered.

"Lucy, wait." He rested his hand on her wrist before she could sit up. "Not no," he told her softly. "Just... not quite yet." He hesitated. "Will you— can you take it that way?"

She was horrified to feel tears prickling in her eyes. Hastily, she closed them. "I'm just— tired." Weary. Exhausted. Heartsick. But the last thing she wanted was him thinking she was trying to manipulate him.

"And you have too much to bear."

That was, after a minute, what gave Lucy the strength to take a deep breath and open her eyes. "So do you."

He didn't respond, just continued to watch her. Waiting for an answer, she realized.

Another deep breath. "Yes. I can wait."

He exhaled slowly. "Lucy, you— I have to believe you came into this—" He gestured awkwardly between the two of them. "Knowing, ahhh..." He looked down.

"I know exactly who you are, Garcia," she told him quietly.

He looked back up at her, startled, shaken. "... but you deserve a partner and not a, uh, patient," he managed to finish. "Which is what I'd be right now."

"I can wait," she assured him again. "But— Garcia— you have to know, you need to know, I don't only want you when you're strong. That's not what partners are."

His look was tender, solemn, overwhelmed. She stroked the back of her fingers across his cheek. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arm around her waist, and pulled her more closely against him.

She woke with a heavy heart, but not a pained one. He was solid, and comforting. He stirred a moment later, making a startlingly endearing sleepy noise. Then he kissed her forehead, letting his lips linger a moment.

She waited until he'd pulled away to say, "Don't rush." Better that they take their time than— well.

His expression lightened a bit, but he didn't say anything.

She studied him wondering at— all of it, really. They'd circumvented a lot of things. They'd never even had sex, and yet they'd arrived at an intimacy that felt more profound than anything she'd ever shared with another person.

They'd met as enemies. She'd had no reason to hold back her opinions of him. Somehow, that honesty had bridged two sides of a war, and slowly become the mainstay of their relationship. And when you were in the habit of being honest with someone, for so long, it became harder to put up the walls and redirect signs you used with everyone else.

_They've taken so much from me. God help them if they take you._

She buried her face against his chest.

After a while, she muttered, "Is it normal people waking up time?" It was late enough in the year that the sun no longer rose at ungodly o'clock.

"Close." His voice was delightfully deep and gravelly, situated as she was.

She showered and dressed, and discovered they weren't the first ones up. Wyatt, Rufus, and Jiya were gathered around the kitchen table, the remnants of what looked like an impromptu breakfast on their places. And they'd been laughing at something.

Wyatt saw her watching first. His expression softened.

She'd lost her family. She'd discovered they'd never even existed like she'd thought. She'd lost— her job, her livelihood, her innocence.

But she hadn't lost them. She'd found them. Her real family.

Her eyes prickled. Things seemed a little less bleak.

"Hey." Wyatt crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her. "Hey, it's okay."

She had to laugh at that. She heard a familiar footstep behind her. Wyatt tensed, started to let go, and then— didn't.

"I know," she said after a minute, and extricated herself. Garcia continued into the kitchen, with one quick but comprehensive backwards look to see if she was okay.

Lucy hadn't heard his chair push back, but when she pulled away from Wyatt, Rufus was there. He pulled her into a wordless hug, just because. She held him tightly. Rittenhouse had taken him and they'd gotten him _back_.

"There's still some left," Rufus told her. "You might have to fight Flynn for the rest of the bacon, though."

She smiled at him. "I think we can work something out."

Her family. God help whoever came for any of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes: Unusually for such a progressive show, _Timeless_ starts with not just one but three fridged female characters: Jessica, Lorena, and Iris. The show brings Jessica back, and this fic gives her her own story. But I frankly could not figure out how to bring Lorena and Iris back within the confines of this fic. So this is me acknowledging the problem.
> 
> There are other things I won't be able to fit into this story, either. So... we'll see.
> 
> Fun historical facts: Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in outer space, took a picture of Bessie Coleman with her.
> 
> Bessie and Josephine Baker knew each other, and Josephine got her pilot's license in 1933. Ida B. Wells-Barnett presided over Bessie's funeral.
> 
> "We were very merry, we were very tired" is from Millay's _Recuerdo_.
> 
> I know Connor says Weapon of Choice came out in ’64, but the actual blurb they show says 1955. Also, can we talk about how one of the Mason Industries employees is so used to this that he just calmly hands Rufus a tablet open to the right page?


	11. The End of All Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: on-screen violence and killing; references to homophobia and suicidal ideation

The most freedom she'd ever felt as an adult was here, in this little ten by eight bedroom.

She was clearly a prisoner. Yet other than keeping her here, no one told her what to do, let alone what to think. Her guards were friendly enough, and would chat with her if she kept the conversation impersonal. One of them liked to read an actual, physical newspaper; she let Jessica see it when she was done, and sometimes they talked about events outside. Jessica was allowed to have books, too, though they had to be approved first. Someone in charge of Jessica's imprisonment, probably Denise Christopher, was clearly coming down on the 'rehabilitation' side of things.

Jessica asked for some history books. See, she actually knew a lot of history, thanks to Carol. But she knew history _the way Carol had seen it_. Now, she...

She kind of wanted to see how much she still agreed with.

She'd expected and would've been fine with a battered textbook. She got two smaller books instead, each covering about two and a half centuries. Both of them were well-used and had _L. Preston_ written on the inside first page.

... huh.

In a weird way, Jessica had grown up in Lucy's shadow. They'd never met until the bunker, but the woman who'd raised Lucy had also raised Jessica. Jessica had never thought of herself as Carol's child, though. Carol had raised Lucy because she loved her, and Jessica because _she_ could be useful.

Jessica had understood her place in things, and she'd never really cared about or resented Lucy's status. Not like Emma.

The books made her think, anyway.

What made her most grateful to be here, and not in an actual prison, was Grace. The same guard who brought the newspaper, Yasmin, would sometimes get pictures from a guard at that other base, and show her.

And Wyatt brought Grace for another visit. Just about the first thing he did was show Jessica how to change her diaper.

Jessica was curious, _you think they're ever gonna let me out of here to look after her?_ She didn't ask; she was pretty sure she knew the answer, but Grace was here. Right now, that was enough.

"Am I allowed to know how the fight's going?" Jessica asked, bouncing Grace to try to get her to stop crying.

Wyatt hesitated.

"Never mind, it's fine." She was locked up here, had no contact with the outside world, no way of passing information even if she'd wanted to, and she hadn't asked anything specific. But whatever.

"I'm just wondering if you really know which side you're rooting for," Wyatt said after a minute.

Jessica looked up. "I'm _here_."

"Yeah, that's... why I'm wondering."

"You do realize that once I got out of Rittenhouse I could've gone underground, right? They taught me how. I could've refused to take sides."

He made an infuriatingly noncommittal noise. Was this all part of some Delta Force style interrogation or something? Jessica knew a lot more than what he'd told her about what he could do.

"You wanted to meet your kid," Wyatt said. "Make sure your family was safe. Was that it?"

"What are you really asking, Wyatt?"

He looked at her. "How do you feel about Rittenhouse, Jess?"

She focused on Grace's hair so she didn't have to look at him. "They raised me, Wyatt," she said quietly. "You know all about feeling ambivalent towards someone who raised you."

In the silence, she looked up. From the look on his face, she could tell that one had hit home.

"You were raised by a cult, and I was raised by..." He took a deep breath. "By an abuser. And now we have a kid. What could possibly go wrong?"

She knew how hard it was for him to put that label on it— or at least, it had been hard for her Wyatt. She gave him a small smile, and got a little lopsided one in return.

It was so much harder to let Grace go this time. Her body just _did not want_ that. Jessica drew on all her Rittenhouse training to keep from crying in front of Wyatt. After he and Grace were gone, she curled up in bed and stopped trying to fight it any more.

They hadn't been back since. And tonight, Jessica couldn't sleep. She'd learned to sleep anywhere, and this room had come to feel familiar. But what kept her up, as the moon shone through the window, was feeling like she didn't know where she belonged.

She heard a faint noise—

No. She heard a noise _stop_.

Specifically, a car engine turning off. Just at the edge of her hearing.

She slid to the floor. She knew the schedules of the guards. It wasn't time for someone to show up. Could've been Agent Christopher or someone who needed to talk to her... if it hadn't been five in the morning.

Jessica hesitated, and banged on the door.

She heard a footstep.

"Someone's out there," she said quietly. "I just heard an engine turn off. I know you can't leave. But get someone else up."

Silence.

" _Please_. Just go check it out. Unless you were expecting someone."

"I'll have someone look," Yasmin said reluctantly.

Jessica looked around the room for anything she could use as a weapon. Sheets— Jiya had used that, once upon a time, but Jessica wouldn't have the element of surprise if this was Rittenhouse. They knew what she was capable of.

Gunshots. A scream.

Someone swore outside the bedroom door. Running footsteps— the door opened—

But no one came through.

The fact that her guards had just let her out told Jessica everything she needed to know about how bad it was. Jessica locked the door and pulled it shut again. The next room was storage. She closed that one too.

More shots outside.

They'd have the place surrounded. Jessica was fighting on unfamiliar territory— she'd never even seen the whole building. And she didn't have a gun.

Well, this hallway would be a terrible place to be trapped. Rule one: don't be where or do what your enemy expects.

She locked and shut every door she came to. She'd have fewer places to run, but if she could stay out of sight, Rittenhouse would have to break down every door.

She ended up in the compound's little kitchen. Someone cried out in pain near the front door as Jessica frantically ransacked the drawers. She managed to find a pathetically small paring knife and a skillet. She tucked the knife up her sleeve, grabbed the skillet, hoisted herself onto the counter, and climbed into the shadows on top of the refrigerator as the front door burst open.

A hail of gunfire covered whatever happened next. The building was old enough that the kitchen was lit by a single lightbulb, not fluorescents. Jessica reached out and unscrewed the bulb, then pulled back into the darkness.

She hoped it wasn't just Rittenhouse shooting, but she wasn't counting on the guards to protect her. Some of them were probably _in_ on it, for Rittenhouse to have found her.

Running footsteps, and more gunshots. These guards didn't deserve to die this way. They'd been... they'd been human to her.

Two men in black, with vests and helmets, burst through the door. The one in front swept the room with his rifle, and relaxed a little when he didn't see anything. Jessica waited for the second to come into the room before she launched herself down.

She landed right behind the second man. The first spun— Jessica yanked the second man between them— the bullets hit his vest— she pulled her shield's pistol from its holster and shot the first man in the head—

The second man elbowed her in her gut. She stumbled back, but hung on to the gun and shot him before he could turn far enough to aim at her. Both men fell to the ground.

There was firing elsewhere in the building. Maybe these shots in the kitchen would go unnoticed. She quickly stripped the smaller man of his vest, helmet, and clothes, and muscled his body into a cabinet. She tugged everything on over her pajamas, stuffed her feet into his too-big boots, and took the two seconds to tie the laces securely. The last thing she needed was to fall on her face. Then she stuffed her hair up under the helmet, grabbed his rifle, turned off the light, and slipped out of the kitchen.

She hadn't recognized either of those two men. Emma had gotten help from somewhere. Maybe that meant they wouldn't all know each other, either.

Which way? A wrong turn meant death, but so did hesitation. She headed in the quietest direction. They were systematically breaking down the closed doors by the sound of it. She didn't know if any of her guards were left alive, or if they'd gotten off a call before Rittenhouse broke in.

She turned a corner and saw the rear guard at the back door. Her instinct was to flinch back, but she kept going like she belonged. The closer she could get—

He did a double-take. She brought her gun up and shot him between the eyes.

It was slowly sinking in just how damned unnatural it was to make a twelve-year-old spend hours and hours at the shooting range, but right now, Jessica was grateful Carol had.

The dead guy would probably have a phone. But Jessica didn't have any way of contacting DHS. She'd need a guard's phone for that. She could make a break for it now and hide, hoping she could survive without gear longer than they could search the surrounding area for her. Or...

Listening to her instincts had served her well so far. She shoved the body out the back door and slipped out after it, into the outside air for the first time in weeks. It was _cold._ She circled the building, dropping below the windows and crawling. She reached the front door and heard alarmed shouting inside.

They must have broken down all the doors, or possibly discovered the bodies in the kitchen. But the rear guard at the front door was distracted enough by it that Jessica could open the door, grab him, and slit his throat.

The shouting _wasn't_ coming from the kitchen. She moved the body outside, got the door closed, and crouched behind the same overturned table the guard had been using as cover, just as another Rittenhouse agent came into view. He glanced her way and kept going. Adrenaline-fueled tunnel vision was an amazing thing. But he was heading for the kitchen. She shot him in the neck—

More alarmed shouting, very close by.

Well, shit.

She bolted out of cover and flattened herself against the wall. A barrel appeared—

Shots erupted out of the room across the hall. Jessica ducked back, but the man around the corner fell to the ground with a _thud_.

She dove across the hallway and slid into the room, staying low. Shots flew over her head, but she recognized those shoes— "It's Jessica!" she hissed.

The shots stopped. She ducked around the overturned couch. Yasmin was sprawled back there, a makeshift bandage fastened around her thigh, with another guard, Stefan. He was breathing, but he didn't look good.

"Is there anyone else alive?" Jessica asked.

Yasmin shook her head. "Don't know."

"Call—"

Yasmin looked at her as if she was an idiot. "I already did."

"How many of them are there? I've killed four."

Yasmin shook her head again.

It was a lot quieter out there all of a sudden. "How do I get to the cars?" Jessica demanded. "If I can bring one around to the front door, you and he can make a run for it."

"Logan, I'm not _running_ anywhere, and he's certainly not."

"Do you have a _better_ idea?"

Yasmin gave her a dirty look. "First door off the kitchen. Here." She handed Jessica a key. "The keys are in the cabinet, code 022451."

Someone was moving around farther down the hallway, but she didn't meet anyone on her way to the kitchen. She unlocked the right door and slipped through—

The impact of the bullet threw her back against the door.

Instinct kicked in even as she fought for breath. She dropped— the muzzle flash had been off to the right— she rolled left. Her head hit something hard— a car— she scrambled behind it and waited for her eyes to adjust, chest throbbing painfully.

Was this a DHS guard who'd automatically fired at the sight of someone in a vest and helmet? Or was this another Rittenhouse rear guard, who'd gotten a good look at her face? She would've been silhouetted in the dim doorway— but why would a DHS agent be hiding in the garage after the shooting had stopped?

Anyone who'd seen her face would also have noticed the vest, and know she probably wasn't dead after that shot.

She heard someone shift on the other side of the garage.

One of her boots had come unlaced. She pulled it off and undid the other, leaving them just barely in sight around the front of the car. Then she crept backwards. It was hard to move silently in so much gear, but she managed it. Rittenhouse had trained her well, and they'd emphasized that for a woman her size, speed and stealth would always be more important than brute force.

They played cat and mouse, her shifting around the side and back of the car as the agent approached the front. There was at least one more car beyond this one. She moved between the two of them, staying low—

The agent's steps halted. He was already turning as she vaulted over the front of the car, rifle held in both hands. But she was faster. Her gun slammed into his neck, and she shot him as he went down.

Her chest _ached_. But shots from inside the house propelled her into motion again. She found the cabinet and grabbed the keys to one of the cars. This wasn't going to be quiet. She retrieved her boots, opened the door, and backed the car out, waiting for more shots.

None came. She made it into the house again without being attacked. The three new bodies in the break room helped explain why.

"They came to finish off the survivors," Yasmin rasped, now with blood running down her cheek. But the cut looked minor.

"People always underestimate survivors," Jessica muttered. "C'mon—"

"You have to search the rest of the house."

"What?"

"We're not leaving anyone behind."

Jessica looked at her in disbelief. This was so, so impractical. It was ridiculous. "Are you serious?"

"Search the damn house, Logan."

It wasn't like Yasmin could effectively threaten her, wounded like that. Still. "Fine."

She worked her way through three rooms before she heard the yell: "LOGAN!"

She rushed back to where she'd left the other two.

"We have to go." Yasmin was pulling herself to standing using a chair.

"No argument from me, but what happened to checking for survivors?"

Yasmin held up something she'd apparently just taken off one of the dead attackers. "He had directions to the other bunker."

Jessica felt cold. "To the team?"

"No," Yasmin said. "To the _families_."

Jessica stared at her.

Then she knelt. "Where's he hurt?" she demanded.

"Hip wound."

She slid her arms under Stefan's shoulders and knees and ruthlessly hauled him up. He passed out from the pain, and she regretted that, but she'd regret wasting time more. They got him in the back seat. Jessica drove, or rather, refused to hand over the keys, so Yasmin collapsed in the front.

The front door flew open as they peeled out, and someone opened fire, but the car was going too fast and it was too dark for them to hit much.

"Directions?" she demanded when they were clear. "How far is it?" From something Wyatt had let slip, she knew it wasn't more than an hour. They could conceivably get there—

In time.

Maybe.

Maybe this had been the second stop.

Instead of answering, Yasmin rolled down the window, leaned out, and opened fire on—

Shit, of course there'd be a rear guard with the vehicle, and that was definitely it up there. Jessica slid down as far as she could, sped up—

And then they were past. The van didn't follow.

"No one's picking up at the compound." Yasmin's voice was tight. She gave Jessica directions, and then tried again.

Jessica accelerated.

"Jesus, Logan, we're not going to do anyone any good if we die in a fiery heap at the bottom of a cliff."

"I know what I'm doing." Rittenhouse had taught her to drive.

Yasmin didn't relax until they were off the winding mountain roads and in the valley. "Don't think I'm complaining, but why didn't you just take the car and go?"

Jessica sped up even more, and focused on the road. "I thought about it," she admitted after a few minutes. "But—"

She shook her head, unable to put into words why she hadn't. Maybe it was that whatever DHS did to her wouldn't be worse than what Rittenhouse had tacitly threatened. By that standard, even in prison, she'd be free.

"I'm starting to think they shouldn't be in charge of a hot dog stand, let alone the world," she admitted. That felt— it was one thing to leave, another to _say_ —

" _Starting?_ " Yasmin echoed.

"... the last time I suggested anything like that, I ended up handcuffed in the psych ward."

"... oh."

"Yeah."

"And I have no intention of running," Jessica added after another minute, "but I'm also not going to be a sitting duck in custody while they come after me. Or anyone else. I'll stand down once we're all safe, not before."

Yasmin shrugged. "You could've taken the car and escaped. You could've escaped on foot. If you're playing a long game here... it's a _long_ game."

Jessica's mouth twisted. She'd spent most of her life playing a very, very long game. "Not this time."

"Besides," Yasmin added. "I'm friends with some of the guards at that bunker. And I can't protect them, not like this."

Following Yasmin's directions, they climbed into the mountains again. Stefan groaned softly in the back seat, and Yasmin twisted to check on him. Jessica focused on keeping them on the road.

"It's over this rise," Yasmin said. "Kill the lights."

Jessica did, and had to slow. The moonlight helped some. "They'll have a rear guard, too. Where do you think they'll've parked?"

"Just over the ridge, I'm guessing."

Jessica pulled off and parked— and heard shots.

At least they weren't too late. Yet.

"Keep trying to get through to Agent Christopher," she said, yanked her helmet back on, reloaded her gun, and got out of the car.

She found Rittenhouse's cars and silently killed their rear guard. Then she crept down the slope.

Rittenhouse's people were spread out in a half-circle around the cluster of buildings, taking cover in the woods. They'd shot out all the front windows of the main building, a long, low cabin, but return fire was keeping them too far away for a grenade.

Two of the agents huddled together for a minute, and then one headed up the hill. She couldn't let him find the dead guard. She waited, grabbed him, and slit his throat before he could yell.

He'd had car keys in his hand. What did he want?

She'd checked that the cars were empty, but nothing else. The second trunk she opened, she found grenade launchers. She dumped them in the woods, hesitated over the grenades, grabbed two, and crept down the hill again.

"Surrender and you will be spared," the agent who'd instructed the other said into a bullhorn. "Continue to fight, and we will raze the compound and leave no survivors."

Surrender and you'll be spared? What a bunch of bullshit.

She really wasn't used to grenades. She knew how they worked, she just... _really_ didn't want to get the range wrong. She hefted the one in her palm a few times, getting a feel for the throwing distance. She found shelter behind a low rock ridge, readied the rifle she'd taken off the dead rear guard...

Took a deep breath, pulled the pin, and _threw_ the thing towards the densest cluster of Rittenhouse agents. Then she ducked behind the rock and waited—

She'd never been so close to an explosion before. _So that's why it's called a_ shock _wave_ , she thought stupidly, belatedly aware of not being able to hear anything. Her face stung. Her fingers came away bloody. But— she could _see_ , and she couldn't lose the advantage. She sat up, swung the rifle over the rock, and opened fire.

Rittenhouse was still in chaos from the grenade. In those first few seconds it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of these agents didn't have helmets, and she didn't stop to question that. Then most of the survivors managed to put a tree or something between them and her—

Someone opened fire from inside the cabin, from right inside the windows, this time. Rittenhouse was trapped between them, which meant their only chance of survival—

A wave of agents stood and charged upslope.

One tossed something very familiar in her direction.

She dove over her shelter and rolled down the hill, away from the grenade. The explosion tossed her into a boulder and peppered her legs with debris. She lay there, stunned—

She snapped out of it to find a gun in her face.

She lay still.

"It's Logan!" the man on the other end of the gun yelled. "We want to take her alive?"

Below, a crashing sound—

— a crying baby—

More shots, but these were close. The man ducked, taking his attention, but not his eyes, off of her.

She moved. The bullet barely missed her head as she levered herself onto her knees and slammed her head into his stomach. He choked— she grabbed his gun arm, rage and terror lending her strength— She forced his gun away from her, brought her own gun up, and shot him.

Oh fuck right behind him—

But this one collapsed with blood oozing from his head.

Jessica risked one glance uphill, and despite everything, was impressed. That was a long way up the slope from the car with a bum leg.

Then she made sure her immediate vicinity was clear, and plunged downhill.

In the back of her mind was the awareness that she'd killed so many people today. She wasn't a killer— she didn't want to do this—

But the other choices were worse.

God, was this what it felt like to be Garcia Flynn?

She reached the bottom. Rittenhouse had stormed the cabin, and several of them had died crossing the open ground out front, but they'd made it inside. Shots— muzzle flashes—

Oh God. If she'd been more subtle she could have avoided this.

She dove through the front door and rolled immediately. She was in some kind of living room— All the furniture was overturned— Somewhere, Grace was crying— Rittenhouse agents were fighting Homeland Security agents, but she didn't see—

There. Two more Rittenhouse guys were heading down a hallway.

She charged after them. Her gun clicked empty.

She dropped it and tackled the trailing man. She grabbed his face and went for his eyes— He tried to throw her forward over his head— She dropped her center of gravity and hung on— He pried one of her hands away, fingers closing on hers— She got her arm across his throat, put all her weight on him, and drove her heel into his groin.

He stumbled. She dropped back to the ground, got both hands around his neck, and snapped it with a vicious jerk. As he went limp, she grabbed his gun and shot the man in front.

She—

Oh God. Oh God, no. A wave of nausea derailed her attempt to get her bearings, because of the things she had left in her life that she wanted, not having her parents see her kill someone was pretty close up there after everyone surviving.

But at least they were alive to be horrified.

"Close and barricade the door and stay back from the windows," she snapped, and turned back to the living room.

But it was over.

The Rittenhouse agents were dead, dying, or prisoner. As she watched, three of the Homeland Security agents hurried out to mop up on the hillside. The rest who hadn't taken up guard positions were doing first aid.

Or staring at her.

"Miz Logan?" The sturdily-built black man about her father's age wasn't pointing his gun directly _at_ her, but it was certainly out.

She didn't make any sudden movements. "One of your people is in the back of a car over the ridge. He needs immediate medical attention. He's lost a lot of blood."

The man dispatched one of his agents outside. "We've called for reinforcements. How did you get here?"

"They attacked where I was being held. Yasmin, Stefan and I got away. I don't know if anyone else survived. Yasmin found information on one of the dead agents that made us think they were attacking here. What about— what about the team? Are they safe?"

"We're trying to reach them now."

She swallowed. But that base was a lot farther. If Rittenhouse had hit all three at the same time, she'd never get there in time.

"I'm not going to handcuff you, because you just saved us," he added. "But put the gun down and sit tight while I check on everything you just told me."

Jessica did as she was told, righting a chair and brushing it off before she sat down. "Yasmin's up on the hill," she told him. "And she can't walk."

"They'll find her." He got the attention of one of the agents who'd just turned away from a dead Rittenhouse guy. "Have a look at Miz Logan when you get the chance."

"I can do it."

Jessica's head snapped up.

"Mister Cody, it's not safe." But the man said it with a resigned air that suggested they'd butted heads before.

"She's my daughter." Dad turned over the chair next to Jessica's, sat down, and opened a first aid kit.

"You weren't supposed to see." Jessica's voice shook.

Dad didn't say anything right away, just started dabbing the blood away. "You protected us long enough, Jessie," he finally said gently. "It should've been the other way around."

She swallowed. "Is everyone okay?"

"We're all fine, thanks to you and them." He nodded towards the other agents.

She sat there quietly while Dad tended all her wounds. DHS secured the perimeter and started putting the cabin to rights. Once they'd boarded the windows, they let the others move out of the hallway.

Jessica looked up. The Carlins and her brother looked shellshocked— and—

She felt a visceral revulsion at seeing Grace here, surrounded by all the destruction and carnage. "She shouldn't—" She cut herself off before she could finish the rest of that stupid statement. Where else could Grace _go?_

Mom took Dad's recently vacated seat, rocking Grace, who was starting to fuss. Jessica tried not to flinch away from either of them.

"Honey, I'm not sure what to say to you," Mom admitted after a minute.

Jessica looked down. "It's okay."

"I think it's supposed to be 'I'm sorry.'"

Jessica's head came up. Mom's eyes were wet.

The agent in charge came over before that could go any further. Jessica wasn't sure she could handle a conversation like this right now, anyway. "I've reached the team's base," he told Jessica. "They say everything's quiet."

She felt her shoulders slump in relief.

"Stefan's being evacuated," he added, "and there's a team on its way to search the other base for survivors."

"There were still some Rittenhouse—"

"They can handle their jobs, Miz Logan," he said drily.

When he was gone, her brother came over and perched awkwardly on the arm of Mom's chair. " _Jess?_ " He looked at her like she was some strange creature from the Black Lagoon.

"Hey, Goober," she said tiredly.

He didn't look impressed.

"I used to call you that, do you remember? My bald goober brother."

"Was all this— it was because of me, wasn't it?" he blurted. "It was because of my leukemia."

Jessica looked away, not sure how to answer that.

"Mom?" Kevin prompted.

"Oh, Kevin—" Clearly Mom didn't know, either.

The agent in charge, who was apparently saving all sorts of Codys from awkward conversations tonight, started a conclave. "As soon as we can get the people here, we'll be escorting you to another base for your safety."

"Reggie, do we know how they found us _here?_ " Mrs. Carlin asked.

He hesitated. "Not yet. There's been no contact with the outside world except through the approved channels. We're looking at other possibilities."

Possibilities like Rittenhouse had infiltrated DHS.

Wait.

"... Kevin?" Jessica eyed her brother, who suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

"... I texted someone," he blurted.

" _What?_ " about seven people said at once.

"How?" Reggie demanded.

" _Why?_ " the dark-haired woman beside him added.

They all looked really, really pissed off.

Kevin swallowed. "There's a spot up the hill where I just barely get reception. I— I just needed to make sure someone was all right! And I wanted them to know I wasn't dead. I didn't tell them where I _was_ , so I don't know—"

"If Rittenhouse had access to the right cell carrier, they could have triangulated the signal," Reggie said, as if he were explaining what two plus two equals.

Kevin blanched.

"Why?" Reggie added. "What was worth risking this entire place for?"

"I didn't know! And I just— I just wanted them to be safe. I've been afraid that Rittenhouse was— was going to come after them because of me, and I couldn't stand not knowing any longer—"

"We could have contacted them _for you_." Reggie looked like he'd exhausted his patience.

"We asked when you came in if there was a girlfriend or anyone that we needed to—" the dark-haired woman added.

"He's not a girlfriend, he's my boyfriend!" Kevin blurted.

Dad's mouth fell open. Mom stared blankly. The Homeland Security agents looked torn between chagrin, and an intense desire to stake Kevin out for the bears to eat.

"This touching family moment has been brought to you by homophobia," Jessica muttered.

Dad gave her an irritated look, Kevin a scared and defiant one.

Jessica relented. "Look, it doesn't _matter_ to me, okay? I mean, besides that it matters to you."

Mom cleared her throat. "Or... or me."

Dad turned his astonished look on her.

"Carl, we all could have died tonight," Mom said. "Our children are both alive and so is our grandchild and it could easily have been otherwise. That's... that's all I care about."

Dad closed his eyes, and suddenly looked very old. "We're not going to fight about it, son," he muttered, and Kevin slumped. "Just give your old-fashioned dad some time to... get used to how the world looks these days."

"Congratulations on your coming out," Reggie said drily after a minute. "You realize we could have you arrested for your security breach."

Jessica again took pity on Kevin. "It can't just be Kevin's text. There has to be a hole in your security somewhere."

Reggie turned that dry expression on her. "Oh? How do you figure?"

"Because knowing about this place wouldn't tell them about the other," Yasmin said from the door.

Jessica was surprised at how relieved she was to see her.

"Fair point," Reggie said. "One of the bodies might tell us more."

They went back and forth about details of the attack— Jessica watched Kevin, who was staring into space through a crack in the hastily applied boards.

Into space?

"Something out there?" she asked.

His eyes widened. "Geddown!" He tackled Jessica— they hit the floor hard— the shot—

 _The shot_.

 _No. No. Nonononono—_ Jessica rolled out from under him. "Kevin. Kevin!" Her hands shook so badly she could barely pat him down to see where it had—

He groaned.

" _Fuck_ , where did it hit?" The agents would have— if it wasn't somewhere vital— She didn't feel any blood, see any blood—

Dad fell to his knees on Kevin's other side, frantic—

"Just winded," he managed.

Jessica belatedly became aware that two of the agents had shoved the overturned couch in front of that window as several more returned fire. " _You Goddamned moron, I'm wearing a bulletproof vest!"_

She was so relieved. So relieved. She was so very glad he was alive that she wanted to strangle him with her bare hands.

Kevin looked at her blankly. "... could have been a head shot?"

"Christ, Kevin, you make me want to hug you _to death_ and then lock you in a padded room where you can't possibly—"

"It was my turn," he said.

She looked at him. "... what?"

"My turn. You suffered enough for me, Jessie."

She thought her head was going to explode with frustrated rage. " _That's not at all how that works!"_

Okay. Okay, calm down, there were more important things here than her idiot brother _who'd apparently had all his brains surgically removed during one of his hospital visits and no one had noticed until now_ —

More important things. Like there was a sniper out there, apparently. "Mom, give me Grace. Wait. No." She struggled out of the vest and helped Mom into it. Mom sat with her back to the window, Grace sheltered in her lap, and for good measure Jessica sat back-to-back with her, between her and the window.

"Now who's being a hypocrite?" Kevin muttered.

"If you think for one second I'm going to let anything happen to her while I'm breathing you're even stupider than I thought." It tumbled out as a growl.

As they huddled like that, she began to feel all the injuries she'd gotten that morning, especially the massive bruise on her chest. Finally the agents gave the all-clear, and nailed more boards up.

Mom offered Grace to Jessica.

Jessica was torn between longing, and flinching away. She didn't even know how many people she'd killed today.

But what if this was her last chance? She'd be going back into custody—

She took off a dead man's stolen clothes, and sat in her sweaty, dirty pajamas, gently cuddling her daughter. Someone brought her a bottle when Grace began to fuss again. Mom showed Jessica how to burp her, and then Jessica felt an overwhelming sense of wonder when Grace fell asleep, her head against Jessica's shoulder.

 _Wouldn't you like to do better for your own children?_ Carol's voice echoed in Jessica's mind.

Jessica couldn't think of anything she wanted _more_ . But not in the way Carol had meant. Not _by_ the ways Carol had meant.

Eventually she accepted Mom's offer of real clothes, and let Dad hold Grace while she changed. Mom was an inch or so shorter than her, so the pants looked ridiculous, but otherwise they were about the same size. She—

"Yes. Here," Reggie was saying into the phone as Jessica returned to the living room. He held the phone out to her.

She took it. "... hello?"

" _Where are they?_ "

The voice was so distorted with static and— _anger_ , that she didn't recognize it. "Where are _who?_ "

"The _team!_ They jumped, they appeared in northern California for like a second, and then they _vanished_."

He was speaking so fast she could barely understand him. She'd never heard him sound like this. "Rufus, slow _down_ —"

Kevin Carlin's head snapped up.

"Rittenhouse has something to do with this," Rufus growled. "Where are they?"

"Rufus, I don't _know_ , I told Agent Christopher all the locations I knew about." Her mind was racing. Northern California? "There was one place I heard Carol mention once, but I said all that in my interrogation."

Shuffling on the other end of the line. "Hello?" It was Agent Christopher. "Which base?"

"The one up in the mountains, some kind of camp. Outside Redding."

"Right. We checked into that. It was empty, and there was no connection to Emma or any of her people."

"... Cahill?" Whatever else Rufus said was lost.

A long pause. "No."

Rufus made a noise that Jessica couldn't even describe. She didn't know what was going on.

"Is there anything about that base you didn't tell me?" Agent Christopher added.

"No. I told you everything I know. Like I said, I never knew that it was used, I don't even know if it was a Rittenhouse site. I just heard Carol talk about a place up there."

"Fine. Sit tight. We'll have you all here shortly." Agent Christopher hung up.

Jessica handed the phone back to Reggie. Then she squatted next to Dad, and gently kissed Grace's hair. "Take care of her." It came out a little choked.

"Of course we will." Dad sounded perplexed.

Jessica got up and headed for the door. Things were still confused enough that she actually _opened_ it before anyone noticed.

"Miz Logan!" There was a general rush in her direction.

"You can arrest me in California," she said, and sprinted for the hill before they could get to her.

#

Suddenly, Rufus's loss hit her all over again.

Jiya breathed in sharply. He was just climbing out from under the Lifeboat. She got up from the console where she'd been coding, grabbed him, and pressed him back against the time machine. She clung to him, burying her face in his sweatshirt and breathing in his scent.

"... Jiya?"

He was there, under her hands, yet his presence couldn't dislodge the visceral memory of his death. It couldn't touch the pain of those months without him.

The door closed— Connor apparently realized they needed a moment. Jiya felt herself start to shake. She pulled Rufus backwards until her knees hit the couch, and tugged him down beside her, rolling them so he was between her and the back of the couch.

"Jiya," Rufus said. He took her hand.

She gasped and shifted up to press her lips to the spot where Emma had shot him, reminding herself of the faint salt taste of his skin.

"... okay, I get that you're really upset," Rufus said, "but you're also licking my carotid artery, which is, um."

Jiya shuddered, and eased back to press her face against his chest again.

"Hey. I'm here. Jiya, I'm here."

"But you _weren't_ ," she whispered.

"I know." He wrapped his arm around her waist and held her as she— she didn't cry. It just took her a while to stop shaking.

"You _bled out_ ." Jiya's voice was rough. "Wyatt and I tried to stop it but we couldn't and you couldn't even say anything, you just looked so stunned, and then you _died_ and we had to leave you there. Jesus, Rufus, why did you _do_ that to me?"

"I'm sorry. Jiya, I'm so sorry," he murmured into her hair.

"You say that, but you still came, you all came!" She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him.

"And you came for me," he said softly.

"Yeah, but I didn't ignore a written message telling me not to."

He made a face. "No, you just figured out how to thwart the universe's own rules and make new patterns in space-time."

She glared down at him.

"Jiya, sometimes people... offer too much," he added. "Like Lucy."

Okay, but— "Lucy and I don't have the same issues. You should've trusted that what I was offering to give up was more rational than that."

"I _love_ you, Jiya. I couldn't leave you there. And you— you told me that I told _you_ I was willing to die to bring you back if that's what it took, yet you saved me anyway, so you know _exactly_ what I'm talking about."

"We keep having this conversation," she muttered after a minute.

"We do."

She looked up at him.

"And I hope... I hope one day you can forgive me for making you go through those months alone. Making you invent the Time Warp alone. And— for not being able to tell you I would make a different choice. Because I can't. I couldn't."

"Rufus..."

They kept having the same conversation, and they would until she could figure out what made what _she'd_ done different from what _he'd_ done. Or until she stopped being angry.

"Let me be the one to take the Lifeboat to California tomorrow," she said quietly, after a minute. "Please."

Rufus hesitated. "I've jumped before. Since you brought me back."

"Yeah, but this time we're going looking for Rittenhouse. And we can't both go, someone needs to stay here and help Connor sort through the raw signal from the Lifeboat."

"... not to sound all caveman, but I don't like watching you go into danger like that."

"And I don't like watching _you_ go into danger. Especially not that kind of danger."

He brushed her hair back behind her ear. "All right," he said quietly. "If that's what you want."

Relief flooded through her. She hadn't had a vision, but she just had a bad feeling about this trip. "It is. Thank you."

"But— Jiya, when you get back..." He hesitated. "I think you should think about talking to someone."

It took her a minute. "What, like a—"

"Like a counselor."

"Rufus, I don't need a shrink!"

"No. But you've been through something traumatic, and... the fact that I came back doesn't change that. You shouldn't have to deal with that alone."

"I'm not alone. I have you."

"I'm not a therapist, and more importantly, you're afraid to hurt me by telling me. Or you often are. Or you're upset _about me._ For that matter, that goes for the whole team. So. Talk to someone neutral."

She sighed. "If Denise can find someone I can actually talk to," she gave in grudgingly, "then fine."

Rufus smiled, and kissed her forehead. "Thank you."

She rested against him again, storing up new memories of how he sounded and smelled and felt for the next time the demons of old memories broke loose.

"They're probably going to think we're having sex in here," she muttered after a few minutes.

"I don't care if you don't."

No, Jiya realized. She didn't give a damn.

#

This jump was different.

They were going on the offensive for the second time. Lucy hoped this attempt went better than trying to find and kill Emma in 1880 Missouri. Rufus, Jiya and Connor had tweaked the Lifeboat a bit so that it would resonate better with the malfunctioning Mothership, or something. Now the plan was to... go hunting.

It was also different because Wyatt had argued for her not coming. They were jumping to the present day, so her skills as a historian wouldn't be needed. He'd wanted to bring Denise instead, but she had to be with Homeland Security to coordinate a strike if and when the team found Rittenhouse.

"You wanna back me up here?" Wyatt had finally demanded, turning to Garcia, who'd stayed out of it.

Garcia had watched them both thoughtfully. "Either Lucy comes or the fourth seat stays vacant," he said finally. "Even though we're not traveling in the past, I think she'll be a help rather than a hindrance, don't you?"

Wyatt had given him a dirty look.

"Great," Lucy had muttered. "The Garcia Flynn Not As Useless As You Could Be award."

Third, they were leaving at a truly ungodly hour. The goal was to avoid catching Rittenhouse's notice, and being there in the quiet hours before dawn would help. But it seemed like she'd just fallen asleep when she heard Garcia moving around their room.

"Please tell me you just need to go to the bathroom and you're being super noisy about it," she muttered, eyes closed.

She heard the quiet _clink_ of a mug on the desk near her head, and smelled fragrant coffee. Which meant no. But she still appreciated it.

Fourth, she was taking her own gun. Which she probably should've started doing many trips ago.

The pistol dug into her ribcage as she strapped herself in. "I don't know how Denise does this," Lucy muttered.

"Practice," Wyatt said.

Jiya's expression was tight as she started up the Lifeboat. She'd had an intense conversation with Rufus, even more than usual, before boarding. Now she flipped a series of switches, and the grav trains started to rumble up to speed.

Lucy felt the familiar nausea—

Jiya swore. "Not again!"

"Not again, what?" Garcia demanded.

"They've got us—"

"How could they if they didn't—" Lucy and Wyatt's eyes met.

"... know we were coming," he finished for her.

One of the guards? Or had Rittenhouse hacked into their tracking equipment somehow? Or...

Jiya flipped a series of switches. Something in the Lifeboat shrieked, and Lucy felt a horrifying pressure. This was far too much like their escape from the 2017 of the Rittenhouse-rules-all timeline. They started to land— then the normal landing noises went away—

"Can you get away?" Wyatt demanded.

Jiya shook her head. "All I can do is—" They started to land again, and again, didn't. "Bounce us down the timeline."

"What will that do?"

The Lifeboat slowed to a stop.

"We're... on top of the Mothership again," Jiya said.

And this time, after Wyatt and Garcia's attack on the base, Lucy's biological father would probably be in a far less genial mood.

"It's about twenty-two hours after we left," Jiya added.

Lucy sorted through what this meant. "Does that mean they were running the— the trap the whole _time?_ "

"They might've been running it for days, waiting for us to jump."

"Where'd they get the _power?_ I thought—"

"The Mothership," Garcia guessed. "The plutonium battery."

They looked at each other.

"Uh, guys." Wyatt's voice was tight as he looked out the hatch—

"Come out now and I might let some of you live," Emma called.

Lucy felt cold.

They climbed out into an abandoned auditorium of some kind. The Mothership sat off to one side, with more cords than usual hooked up to it. Maybe Garcia was right.

Something about the room was strangely familiar, but...

More important were all the armed guards pointing rifles at them. And Emma, standing in the middle of all of them with a pistol in her hand. Somehow she managed to be the scariest.

"It's been a while," Emma greeted her. "We've all been through a lot, haven't we? Let's see, you got your wife back—" She gestured to Wyatt with the gun. "Then you lured me into a trap outside Reno. I was going to be upset about losing the Mothership, but it turns out your little attack in Washington was the opening I needed to counterattack those sanctimonious Cahill bastards. So here we are." She glanced at Garcia. "Sorry about Zagreb, Flynn. That must've sucked. Guess you're more like me than you thought."

Lucy stared at Emma.

Emma smirked, and glanced at one of her men. "Go get him."

 _Him?_ Who? She couldn't possibly have Rufus, could she? Or—

Two men returned with Benjamin Cahill in handcuffs.

Lucy looked from him, taking in the signs of his obvious ill-treatment, back to Emma. "What do you want, Emma?"

"I want the Lifeboat, which you've just delivered me," she said. "And then I want you dead."

"I told you, Emma," Cahill said. "We can work something out. We have resources the Keynes side never knew about. Resources you'll need to win."

"I don't need anything from you to win, now," Emma said. "I captured the Lifeboat on my own."

"Using technology _we_ developed, based on our relationship with Mason Industries."

Emma shrugged. "Water under the bridge."

"And if you kill Lucy now," Cahill added, "you'll be losing a valuable means of incentivizing the cooperation of the rest of the organization. You may not think you need us at all, but you certainly don't need us attacking you."

"I'm not scared of a bunch of rag-tag has-beens." Emma sounded contemptuous. "You're just trying to save your daughter."

"It's true, I am fond of Lucy... she is extraordinarily useful." Cahill attempted a benevolent smile, but his voice had gone tight.

"She's a spoiled brat is what she is." Emma raised the gun towards Lucy.

Cahill tensed— suddenly he was in front of Lucy— and then just as suddenly, he was falling to the ground.

Lucy only registered the noise of the shots in retrospect.

He wasn't dead, she could tell that much. But he would be very soon without medical care.

Emma's eyebrows went up. "What a remarkably efficient way of killing your allies," she said. "I had intended to just haul them out and be done with it, but I think they'd put up less fuss if I let them jump in front of you. Who do you think it'll be next? Flynn? Or Wyatt?" She smirked at Lucy again.

Lucy looked at the man dying at her feet. She looked back to Emma.

"Not the first Cahill I've killed recently, actually. Once I thought about it, it wasn't hard to figure out what must've happened in 2017." Emma was apparently putting off Lucy's execution to inflict maximum pain on Lucy.

Lucy stared at her, feeling that she was suddenly stone.

"I _am_ running through your family tree, aren't I?" Emma added. "Your great-grandfather, your grandfather, your mother, your father, your sister... you..."

Cahill's body went silently limp.

Lucy stared at Emma.

The smile dropped off of Emma's face, replaced by something warier. She looked beyond Lucy. "I see we're missing one in order to have the whole Time Team set. Maybe later we can talk about trading the location of the base for the life of your daughter."

"You're lying." Wyatt's voice was cold and steady. "You don't have her."

Emma shrugged, and raised the gun again—

This time, the shots came from somewhere else in the building.

Several of the men rushed for the door—

An explosion rocked the place.

Emma turned away from them, barking out orders. Harsh hands grabbed Lucy, dragging her backwards. "I can walk," she snapped, and struggled to keep her feet under her.

Whatever was happening was ahead of them, on the other side of the big room. They were being hustled backwards, out another door and into a series of hallways—

"Hey!"

That— sounded like— _Rufus?_

Her guard let go of her— immediately, she spun, just in time to see Rufus duck out of sight down a cross-corridor—

She grabbed for her gun. The guards had thought one per prisoner would be enough of them. They were very wrong.

Garcia killed the last of them just as Rufus reappeared out of the nearest hallway. "C'mon, this way!"

"What are you doing here?" Jiya demanded as they raced on his heels.

"Where's Agent Christopher?" Wyatt added. "Did you come alone?"

" _Later!_ " Rufus led them to an emergency exit with the alarm open and dangling wires. Garcia shoved past him to go first— Wyatt brought up the rear.

They stumbled into the night. They were on rocky, hilly ground, covered in pines and scrubby bushes. They scrambled down a ridge into the dry valley below, Wyatt behind them urging them faster. Garcia stopped at the top of the next rise and helped Rufus over, then Jiya. His hands were warm and rough on Lucy's own as he pushed her past.

They kept going. She ran on auto-pilot. The wind through the trees and the singing of crickets seemed impossibly incongruous with— with—

She nearly plowed into Jiya before she realized they'd stopped. Somewhere nearby, water was rushing. She realized her lungs and her legs were burning.

"What happened?" Wyatt demanded.

"What happened? You showed up on the tracking in northern California and then disappeared, that's what happened," Rufus said. "We've been out here searching for you since noon. Where have _you_ been?"

"I bounced us down the timeline," Jiya said. "I couldn't get free of the trap, but I knew you'd see us appear out here and then disappear hours before they actually had us."

Rufus's eyebrows went up. "Clever girl."

"So, for us, we just jumped a few minutes ago," Garcia added.

"Who's _we_?" Wyatt picked up on the thread of Rufus's explanation.

"Agent Christopher and some Homeland Security agents. We, we got separated, I don't know where she is. The equipment showed the Lifeboat nearby, so I kept going, and then I found the building and I saw you guys through the window."

"Right," Wyatt said. "Okay. So we need to get back there and get the Lifeboat before Emma jumps with it. Right now she's unstoppable."

"We're, uh, a little outnumbered," Rufus pointed out. "Just a little."

"We can't wait! She has the Lifeboat, and she knows about the Time Warp. Any one of us could disappear at any moment."

"What was that explosion you set off?" Jiya asked Rufus. "Do you have any more? Because if we can't get the Lifeboat away from her... we can destroy it."

Silence.

"She wouldn't have gone to all this trouble if the Mothership were working," Jiya pointed out.

Rufus shook his head. "It wasn't a bomb. I sabotaged the boiler."

"Any chance the whole place catches on fire and takes the Lifeboat with it?" Wyatt asked.

"You'd better hope not, because this is fire country, and if that building catches we're not far away."

Lucy sank down onto a boulder.

The lack of options seemed to make Wyatt snap: "She could _have Grace!_ "

"Whoa, no, she doesn't," Rufus said. "There was an attack earlier this morning— yesterday morning— right before you guys left. Both the Wyoming bases. But they fought Rittenhouse off. Everyone's fine."

... but it hadn't been an idle bluff, then. Emma didn't have Grace, but she'd _intended_ to have Grace.

"All right." Wyatt sounded a little calmer. "Did anyone get hurt getting out?"

The rest of them shook their heads. Mechanically, Lucy followed suit.

"Okay. Homeland Security knows where we are, right? So we just have to keep Emma pinned down until they can get here."

"If they're coming," Rufus muttered. "When I left they still weren't entirely sure how Rittenhouse found the one base. There may be a leak."

"And you said you got separated from Agent Christopher," Garcia said.

"That's... what I thought happened until I said that out loud."

Oh, God. So Rittenhouse could've gotten not only any possible reinforcements, but Denise. No. God, no. Lucy couldn't lose anyone else.

"Rittenhouse would have explosives, right?" she said. "Like grenades or something?"

"... uh, probably," Wyatt said.

"They didn't search us last time—"

"No!" Wyatt, Garcia, and Jiya chorused together. Wyatt looked horrified, Garcia furious, Jiya shocked.

"Guys, _I can end this_ ," Lucy said tiredly.

"No, you can't," Garcia snapped. "You don't have a plan, you have a half-assed suicidal impulse that'll last exactly as long as it takes Emma to have you shot in _any other room_. Why would she take you back to the Lifeboat if you surrender?"

Lucy hesitated.

"And you don't even know where you'd find grenades. None of us know our way around this place—"

"Actually, I... think I went to summer camp here," Lucy said.

They all stared at her.

"... it was a little different then."

"So you don't know where Emma's keeping anything," Wyatt pointed out.

Garcia came to stand in front of her. "I'm sorry about your grandfather, Lucy," he said more gently. "But this isn't how we end this. We do it together."

Jiya shrugged. "I mean, I could take the grenade."

Rufus looked horrified. Lucy found herself on her feet. "Absolutely not!"

Jiya gave Lucy a pointed look. Lucy opened her mouth, then shut it again.

" _No one_ is blowing themselves up," Wyatt said fiercely. "We're not doing it this way, so talking about it is just wasting time."

"Okay," Rufus said. "So... what's our plan?"

Silence.

Then Wyatt spun and—

Lucy leveled her own gun at the newcomer. Newcomers.

"Easy," a voice came out of the darkness. "We don't want any shooting."

Lucy frowned. "... Tom?"

Slowly, both hands in sight, Tom Bolick stepped into view. There was someone behind him, but Lucy didn't think they were armed.

"What are you doing here?" Wyatt demanded.

Tom's jaw clenched. "We're defecting."

"'We?'" Lucy looked past the two of them again. This time she saw more people, all armed.

"Yeah," Tom said. "Five of us. We're not— we won't fight for her any more." It cost him something to say it. He turned to Lucy. "I hope to _God_ you never ask me to walk on water, Doctor Preston, because you could probably get me to try."

"There's six of you," Garcia pointed out.

The person— child?— at Tom's elbow stepped forward. She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt over a long skirt; now she put back the hood. Not a child, but definitely young, underfed, or both. "I don't want to do this any more, either." Her voice was quiet.

Wyatt fractionally lowered his gun. "Emma's other pilot," he guessed.

The girl nodded.

"This is Judith," Tom said. "She— well. I've been, uh, biding my time deciding what to do. Trying to sound out some of the others. But Judith decided to run earlier today. One of the other guards caught her. I knew then we had to go, or watch them kill her."

"You don't have to do it any more," Lucy told her firmly. "You got out. Tom... helped you get out. You're, you're free now."

"None of us are free as long as Emma has a time machine and no one to stop her." Wyatt was staring hard at Tom. "You gonna help us do something about that?"

Tom's jaw clenched tighter. "You're asking us to fight against our friends."

"We're asking you to fight against the people you were afraid were going to execute an unarmed girl," Lucy said.

Tom looked at her.

"Your friends—" He nodded at Rufus. "Are trapped in a box canyon about five miles down the road. Emma's got a mole in their ranks. He lured them in, set off a landslide, and trapped them there. They're not coming until someone gets them out."

"Well, that does narrow our options," Wyatt muttered. "You gonna help us or not?"

Tom looked at him. Then he looked at Lucy for a long, long moment.

Lucy stared back at him.

"They'll have noticed Judith's gone," he said reluctantly, "but they might think we're just out here searching for you. We might be able to get back in. If we wait a while longer, say dawn or so, we might all be able to slip through the search net."

"Is it safe to wait?" Garcia asked. "I mean, you found us."

Tom jerked his head backwards. "Peter used to be the best tracker between the Platte and the Niobrara. You weren't hard for him to follow."

"How many people does Emma have?" Jiya asked.

Tom hesitated. "Loyalists? Maybe twenty."

"And what about the rest?" Wyatt prompted.

"About twenty left from the Cahill side, too, except she just shot their former leader. Who knows what side they'll come down on."

"Great," Wyatt muttered. "A three-way fight."

They made their plan. They'd be less conspicuous in small groups, but the soldiers were the ones who knew the search patterns. Each member of the team would go with one defector, sneaking back towards the Rittenhouse compound. Judith would continue to head for safety.

This all depended on Tom and his four men being trustworthy. But they'd come up on the Time Team without being noticed. If they wanted the team dead, they'd be dead.

If Emma wanted them recaptured...

They had to run that risk.

They waited for the sky to start lightening. Garcia came and sat beside Lucy, putting his jacket around her shoulders again. He studied her face for a while.

"Lucy..."

She looked up, tired. "You should've let me go after David Rittenhouse," she whispered.

His face hardened. "No, I _really_ shouldn't have."

Wyatt, not far away, looked at the two of them sharply.

"We _have_ to end this," she bit out.

"We will. But _Cahill_ 's not worth your regret, Lucy."

"It's not that. It's— it's all of it, Garcia."

His expression softened. "I know," he said quietly. "I... know."

She knew that he did, and that was marginally comforting.

He glanced down, and licked his top lip. "Lucy, when I... left after Zagreb. I told you I'd come back if I could. I'd like the same promise from you."

She took a deep breath. She didn't _want_ to die. But she wanted Rittenhouse gone even more than she wanted herself to survive this war. She understood how Garcia had felt, now; she understood why he'd been so willing to give anything and anyone to wipe them out of existence.

But how had that worked out for him?

She looked up at him. "No more human sacrifices," she echoed, her voice coming out rough.

He exhaled. He put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against his shoulder. "We're gonna end this, Lucy," he told her quietly. "Somehow, we'll stop them."

It was cold enough that she was glad to slide closer to him, and just wait.

"Hey, Lucy."

"Mmm."

She felt him take a deep breath. "You talked me down in 1954. You told me there was another way."

"Yes..."

He hesitated. "You do realize that our plan is possible because you talked someone _else_ out of it, right?" He nodded towards Tom.

She looked up at him.

"Have a little faith in yourself, Lucy," he added, voice low and warm. "God knows you have enough in other people."

"I bet you never thought you'd find yourself giving pep talks," she said after a few minutes.

He snorted. "Whatever it takes for you, Lucy."

She pulled away and looked up at him—

And then it was time to go.

#

No battle plan survived first contact with the enemy.

This one didn't even get _that_ far.

Wyatt swore and looked around again. The soldier he'd paired with, Ezekiel, had just... disappeared. Running scared, if Wyatt had to guess. Emma could be taking the Lifeboat back to wipe out her disloyal soldiers already, but in that case Wyatt wouldn't even remember the guy had ever been there.

So Wyatt was left to make his own way back to the compound. The worse option, of course, was that Ezekiel _wasn't_ running scared, but was going ahead to warn Emma. Lucy's skills of persuasion didn't mean this wasn't all a trap.

Lucy. God, Wyatt'd heard enough of her conversation with Flynn to turn his stomach, but not in the usual way. Seeing the Lucy Preston he knew and loved turned into this grim soldier determined to do _anything_ to win— it was a fucking tragedy. _What's the war done to you, Lucy?_

He focused on his surroundings, because the only hope they had of succeeding was for everyone's head to be in the game.

He broke into a run when he heard shots ahead. Sound echoed strangely in terrain like this, and he wasn't sure exactly where they were coming from. He paused right below the top of the next ridge, but he didn't hear any more and he didn't _see_ anyone.

Had that been one of his team, dying? They never should've split up like this. What were they thinking?

He just had to keep going.

More shots ahead—

And then he stumbled into a firefight.

Well, no. He _became_ the firefight.

Whatever the hell they'd been shooting at, it was him now. He ducked under cover and realized he'd mostly trapped himself. The only ways out were either cut off by gunfire, or ten feet straight up, which would leave him exposed on a tree limb until he could crawl under cover.

He popped up and squeezed off three shots, hitting two men. But there were more.

One of them glanced in Wyatt's direction, and that was the only warning he had before a huge man loomed out of nowhere, gun tracking towards Wyatt.

Wyatt ducked and charged him, because it was either that or back up against the rock and get trapped. He slammed into the man, sending him stumbling back an inch or two, but this man might as well've been another rock. He knocked the wind out of Wyatt with one blow— Wyatt tried to shoot him and found his wrist caught in an iron grip—

Wyatt grabbed the man's own gun hand, extended the arm, and slammed it back against a tree branch, breaking his elbow. They staggered— Wyatt saw someone aiming in their direction— he managed to turn them so the bullets hit his opponent. The man dropped to the ground, dead—

but that left Wyatt exposed.

He dove for the ground under another hail of bullets, and rolled. He was never going to get to cover in time—

Someone burst over the ridge behind the two Rittenhouse agents and killed each of them with a single shot.

Wyatt got to his feet and stared. " _Jessica?_ "

Jessica lowered her gun. "She's not growing up without a father."

That— but— how—

Jess looked like she hadn't slept in days, she was bloodied and bruised, and she'd just appeared out of nowhere, when she was supposed to be in federal custody two states away, and saved his life.

"If you trust me at your back right now..." she began. And then didn't finish. Couldn't?

"We're, uh, we're going after Emma."

"Good."

"Do you know this place?"

"Never been here in my life."

"Okay. C'mon."

#

Rufus should've gone with Jiya, directions be damned.

Okay, so wandering around the trackless forest with no idea where they were going probably would be bad. But splitting up like this felt _very_ wrong.

And the casual way Jiya had drawn and checked her gun— Rufus had known she was carrying it, he'd seen her leave with it yesterday morning, and he'd known Flynn had taught her to shoot, but it was another thing to see her so comfortable with it.

She was a badass... but, also, he wished she didn't have to be. Not like this.

He stumbled after the soldier in front of him, trying to stay as quiet as he could—

Suddenly the dude was dead at his feet.

Rufus stared, stunned, then remembered to duck. More bullets flew overhead.

Okay. Okay. He just... had to dodge whatever patrol this was, and find the compound on his own. No big deal.

Was it too late to find one of the other groups? He'd be safer with them. But either way he was basically wandering the wilderness alone. More time outdoors. His favorite thing.

On the bright side, he couldn't get completely lost. All he had to do was head towards the sound of the fighting.

#

Lucy crouched beside Tom, waiting for a pair of Rittenhouse agents to pass.

The plan was to converge on that old auditorium, and either steal the Lifeboat back, if Rufus or Jiya made it through, or disable it. A few bullets in the controls would do it. Hopefully, by the time Emma managed to fix it, Homeland Security would have found her.

Lucy was well aware it might be a case of _or die trying_ for all of them. But they didn't have any choice. As long as they got to the Lifeboat... getting out was optional.

And if they _did_ disable the Lifeboat, this would suddenly become a much more normal fight. Something Homeland Security could handle without them, probably. Maybe.

She got up when Tom did and followed him. Gun in hand, she moved when he did and stopped when he did.

"We're not far," Tom whispered finally. Shots were starting to echo around them, which meant— someone had run into Rittenhouse.

She so desperately wanted them all to make it through this.

Someone grabbed her from behind and yanked her off her feet, wrenching her gun out of her hand.

"Tom!" she gasped. He spun and raised his gun— and then Lucy was hauled backwards down the hill.

She flailed backwards, trying to reach her captor. None of Garcia's lessons had dealt with _what to do when you're suspended in the air_. That frankly wouldn't even have occurred to him.

"Quiet," a man hissed. She was suddenly airborne, and then thrown over a muscular shoulder. She kicked out, trying to hit his groin— He wrenched her around and stuffed a rag in her face.

She went limp immediately, holding her breath. Her lungs burned. The sickly-sweet whiff she'd gotten was enough to make her lightheaded even if she'd been breathing. She had to breathe soon. If he didn't take it away...

The rag disappeared right before she had to gasp for air. It was burning agony to stay limp and breathe slowly and shallowly, but slowly she got her breath back.

What the _hell?_

The man was moving fast, headed uphill now. Lucy played unconscious and racked her brains for a better escape strategy.

She couldn't think of one. He was holding her legs tightly, and even if she got loose, he knew this area much better than she did. He could easily recapture her. If she could only get his gun away somehow— but he had it in his hand instead of in his holster where it would be in easy reach.

The shots had faded a little in the distance. She opened her eyes and regretted it immediately; the upside-down view was nauseating. But they were on a little path, and up ahead was a clearing.

When the man stopped, Lucy felt déjà vu. She _knew_ this place, and this cluster of old wooden cabins.

He dumped her on the ground, and Lucy didn't pretend to be unconscious fast enough, so she moaned, pretending she was just coming around.

"Quiet," he ordered again. He ziptied her wrists— in front of her, at least. "I'm saving your life, you should be thanking me."

"Do you want quiet or thanks?" she demanded.

He glared down at her. "The rest of your friends are about to die. But _you_ , the Cahills will want you."

She couldn't put into _words_ how sick she was of being kidnapped and used as a hostage because of her family tree.

He hauled her to her feet and propelled her into the first cabin. "Stay in there and stay quiet. I'll be watching the path outside. We'll wait out the fight here. If I hear any funny business, I'm coming inside."

He slammed the door behind her and locked it.

This was definitely Lucy's old summer camp. The cabin smelled as she remembered, with a thick layer of dust. The wooden bunk beds didn't have mattresses any more, but the posts were etched with familiar-looking carvings. She had hours of memories of this place— but right now, she had to get out of here.

She looked around the room.

It wasn't totally stripped. There was still some camp-related gear lying around. That was horrifying, because it suggested the place had never changed hands since she'd been here... and that it had been Rittenhouse all along. But it also meant she might be able to find something to help.

She remembered the storage closets. Each cabin had one, and you could get into them through the door from the outside, or through a little crawlspace behind one of the bunks. That bunk had always been taken by the counselor, for obvious reasons.

Little. Crawlspace.

She had no choice.

She pried the panel open and shuddered as the corpses of several decades of spiders. Naturally, because she'd gotten bigger since then, the crawlspace was much smaller than her memories. Worse was the darkness. She'd been willing to die just an hour or so ago to blow up the Lifeboat; this was much easier.

Though prolonged.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to wriggle across the wooden slats, into the darkness. Oh God— Oh God—

 _Fear isn't real_ . Her heart hammered. She forced the words through her brain again: _fear isn't real_.

She wasn't trapped. She could go back just as soon as she was done. Or she wouldn't be as long as she didn't—

Her shoulders hit a narrow portion and for a second she couldn't go forwards or backwards. She stifled a whimper. _Escape..._

She made herself relax. Something shifted, and then she was through. She tumbled to the floor of the little room, and hoped the man outside hadn't heard that. Okay, this was bigger, but it was also _dark_. The only light came through the crawlspace.

She gingerly sat up, felt something pointy in her butt, and jerked herself up. Then her brain caught up with her.

She'd sat on an old battered lawn chair, the kind a staff member might have sat in at the edge of the soccer field, with an exposed, corroded edge. She began to saw at the zipties with the sharp part she'd sat on. Her hands slipped and the rusty metal bit into her wrist, but she kept going. Good thing she'd gotten a tetanus booster after that knife in 1692. The pain stung... and then she was free.

She pressed her wrist to her jeans to stop the bleeding while she looked around. Besides the lawn chair, some tennis rackets, and a box of old records, everything else was in locked cabinets. The camp staff hadn't been ignorant of the temptation posed by the little room.

Records. Lucy went quickly through the box. She stifled her shriek when several silverfish ran over her fingers. But— there. A paperclip gleamed in the dim light. She straightened it, and with shaking fingers, applied it to the nearest cabinet lock.

She didn't really know what she was doing. But these were old, simple locks, not meant to keep out anything more determined than a ten-year-old. She quickly figured out how to catch the latch just right and shift it out of the way.

The fourth cabinet held a bunch of dusty, unstrung bows. In the fifth she found the arrows. Most of them were dull enough to be trusted to ten-year-olds. One quiver was not.

She picked the largest bow, and struggled to string it until the memory came back. It had been twenty years, but archery had been the only sport here she hadn't been terrible at, so she'd gravitated to the range whenever she had the chance.

She tried the outside door. Unlocked, and opened to the side of the cabin. If the man _wasn't_ watching the path, this would be a very short escape.

But she didn't see him when she slipped outside. She picked up the bow and shouldered the quiver, feeling ridiculous and terrified and very determined.

She peeked around the edge of the cabin. Yes, he was standing out front.

She took a deep breath, put an arrow on the string, drew the bow, turned the corner, and released the arrow.

She'd never— oh God.

Seeing the man with an arrow protruding sideways through his ribcage was just viscerally _wrong_ . Bodies weren't meant to _look_ like that, she wanted to retch—

But she didn't.

She ran forward and stood over him as blood bubbled on his lips and his eyes closed. Then she forced herself to yank the arrow out. It stuck— it was a simple shooting range arrow, not barbed for hunting, but—

There was so much blood.

She wiped the arrow on the dying man's pants, feeling like she was desecrating a corpse. Then she grabbed his gun, nearly dropped the bow and quiver, and considered. It might be valuable to have a nearly-silent weapon, right?

She held on to both weapons and ran down the path.

#

It felt like before. She'd asked Rufus to stay at the base and let her make the trip so he'd be safe there. Now instead he was here, pulling them all out of danger.

It felt way too much like before.

Plus, Lucy was again wanting to charge off into danger, ignoring her own safety, to go after Emma. Jiya understood the impulse. Really. But Lucy was just worrying all of them.

She followed close on the heels of the soldier she was with and wished she were with Rufus instead.

Up ahead: the trees thinned. And that looked like a building.

"We'll try to sneak in the back way," Peter muttered.

"How far from the back door to where they're keeping the Lifeboat?"

Something moved off to the side, distracting her. "Hey! Someone's there," she hissed.

Peter spun—

It wasn't a very large someone, though.

Knowing she was busted, Judith stepped out of the trees. Jiya lowered her gun. "What are you doing here? You were supposed to stay behind."

"I wanted to help."

"Sometimes the best thing you can do is stay where it's safe when someone tells you to," Jiya said firmly. "You don't have a gun, do you?"

Judith shook her head.

"You know the way out of here?" Peter asked. "Back to where we were?"

Judith hesitated. "It looked familiar until this last bit."

"Right," Peter said. "You stay here—" That was to Jiya. "We'll be too conspicuous, three together. And she'd be fresh meat for the wolves if they catch her. I'll take her to where she knows the way and then come back."

Jiya didn't like it, but she couldn't disagree with anything he'd said. She scouted around a bit, looking for the best cover while she waited. Actually, up on that ridge she should have a much better view...

She started up the hill. Suddenly, someone grabbed her arm.

#

Lucy stumbled up a hill.

She'd fallen down its predecessor, taken a wrong step and gone twenty feet on her butt before tumbling onto her face. She was bloodied and disoriented. But she still had the bow and the gun. She hadn't been caught yet, not even seen. No one seemed to be expecting anyone to come down from the trail to the disused cabins.

Well, presumably there was a trail. She'd lost it a long time ago.

She tripped and fell again before righting herself. Finally, she scrambled to the top. Below—

She saw the whole compound stretched out. And in a clearing, Garcia on his knees in front of Emma, who had a gun to his head.

Time seemed to freeze. Lucy raised her bow, drew it, and let loose.

The arrow thudded into the tree right behind Emma. She'd _missed_ —

Emma instinctively swung her gun towards this new unseen threat. Garcia lunged. They went tumbling backwards. Lucy put another arrow down the string and plunged down the hill.

Scrambling through the trees, she lost sight of them. The shots she heard came from elsewhere— or so she thought, in these echoing canyons. She headed in the direction she'd last seen them take. Had Garcia had a gun?

She stopped suddenly. Emma had Rufus at gunpoint.

Lucy's first reaction, was, completely irrelevantly, irritation with her teammates for letting Emma get the drop on them twice in two minutes.

Emma didn't make the same mistake twice. She twitched towards Lucy and then caught herself, swinging the gun back squarely towards Rufus. Rufus had a gun at his feet, but he didn't have Garcia's training and he was farther away than Garcia had been. He stayed still, hands up.

Emma raised her eyebrows. "Maid Marian?" she guessed. "This is new."

"Let him go," Lucy ordered.

Emma wasn't shooting Rufus. Not again. Lucy was completely clear on this. If she had to die to keep that from happening... that didn't break her promise to Garcia.

"You won't shoot me," Emma said. "You don't have the guts."

... Emma didn't remember their showdown in the alley.

"I'm weak, right?" Lucy said. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm... maybe I'm just too weak to keep this string taut for much longer."

Something flickered in Emma's eyes, a precursor to fear, and Lucy found that she relished it. She wanted _more_.

"Because here's the thing," Lucy added. "I don't have to shoot you. I just have to let— my arm— get tired..."

"I can tell you what I did to erase Amy," Emma began.

Lucy glanced sideways at Rufus just for a second. His eyes were wide.

"Who knows, you're clever enough, maybe you could st—"

Lucy's arrow took her through the chest.

She felt sick that she had taken the time to toy with Emma while Rufus's life was at stake. Then she felt sick seeing the protruding arrow.

Rufus dove for the ground, grabbed the gun, and rolled until he got behind a tree. Lucy should've done the same. But the stunned look on Emma's face transfixed her.

She should've at least drawn another—

Emma brought her gun up again, towards Lucy, but she couldn't raise her arm enough to actually aim at her. Her face was a mixture of shock and rage. She tried to aim again— stumbled—

Rufus had Emma at gunpoint, now. Had Emma even noticed? Emma's gun tumbled out of her hands. Rufus's finger tightened on the finger, more, more— He tilted his head, and grimaced, but he couldn't—

Two shots rang out. Emma fell to the ground. At the edge of the clearing, Garcia lowered his gun.

The three of them stared at each other.

Garcia recovered first. "I'll—" He glanced at Lucy. "Rufus, cover me."

"Um— um, okay." Rufus leveled his gun at Emma again. Garcia crouched by her side and checked her pulse.

Rufus cleared his throat. "Is she dead?"

Garcia looked up and nodded.

"They." Lucy's voice sounded so strange to her. "They don't have any other... pilots. Do they?"

Even if they did, would they jump on their own?

Was it... over?

"I'm sorry, Rufus," she added.

Rufus stared at her. "What on earth are you apologizing for?"

"I let her keep talking while you were afraid. I— I wanted to make _her_ afraid."

Garcia looked up at her. Unlike Rufus, he remembered Rufus's first death, and the fight in the alley.

Rufus shrugged. "She's still dead. You still saved me."

"And me," Garcia added.

A distant shot snapped Lucy out of it. For the moment. "We should find the others. If they know Emma's dead, the rest of her guys might surrender."

From Garcia's expression, he was maybe considering the contradiction of her trying to minimize any more death when she'd willingly drawn Emma's out. The hypocrisy?

"No, we should secure the Lifeboat," Rufus said. "In case we're wrong about the pilot thing."

Lucy thought about this. "Everyone's making for the compound. If we head in that direction, we should find..."

Whoever was left.

They went that way. "What happened to your soldiers?" Lucy asked.

"Dead," Rufus and Garcia both said.

Lucy winced.

"Yours?" Garcia added.

Lucy shook her head. "I don't know what happened to Tom. A Cahill loyalist grabbed me and tried to lock me in one of the cabins as a bargaining chip for later."

"How many people does Emma have _left?_ " Rufus asked. "Where does she keep getting them?"

"I recognized a few familiar faces that got away at the Astoria base," Garcia said. "So she must have the Cahill and Keynes sides here."

"Denise couldn't find a connection between this place and any of the Keynes," Rufus said. "Maybe this was a backup base for the Cahills, Emma stormed it, took over, and spared anyone who promised to fight for her."

Garcia held up a hand for quiet. He frowned in concentration. "There's fighting up ahead."

#

Wyatt ducked an empty pistol swung at his head, grabbed the owner's wrist, and twisted, forcing him to drop the gun before he could reload. Wyatt's opponent went for his throat. Wyatt barely brought his own gun up in time and fired. He spun in the direction of the loudest noise, just in time to see a man fall limp in front of Jessica and not get up.

She looked up at him.

It was one thing to know that as a Rittenhouse agent she would've been taught to fight, and to see her firing determinedly in the saloon. It was another thing to fight beside her, and see her so instinctively comfortable with a gun in her hand, so obviously able to hold her own in an unarmed fight.

Wyatt had originally assumed Rittenhouse had warned her about the fight in 2012 where he left her on the side of the road, and she'd avoided it. Now he was considering that she'd just fought off her attacker.

"You okay?" she asked.

Yeah, he was staring. "Yeah. Fine. You?"

She nodded.

"We're going through them," he added. "Can't be too many left."

"Hope not. I can't see Rufus and Lucy standing up to trained agents like these."

"Trained agents like you?"

Wyatt didn't mean it to come out like that. He wasn't— angry wasn't the right word. But he was trying to reconcile either of the Jessicas he'd thought he knew with the woman guarding his back.

"Yes," she told him bluntly. "They trained me well."

"I can see that."

"What are you looking for, Wyatt? An apology?"

Wyatt snorted. "No way," he assured her.

She looked a little disappointed at that. He wasn't sure why. But they had bigger problems. "Okay, the building should be over the next ridge. If we can get inside... I'm trying to get inside."

"You can't pilot either of them, so I'm guessing you're trying to disable them."

"If I have to."

Jessica shrugged, not quibbling that he was obviously keeping her in the dark. "Lead the way."

They crawled the last few feet up to the top of the hill. Below was the main building, surrounded by smaller ones. Between them and it was a semi-open stretch of scrubby bushes, occupied by a firefight.

"We'll never get through there," Jessica muttered, watching Rittenhouse agents shoot at each other.

Wyatt thought the guy taking cover behind that pine was Tom, which meant the two with him would be other defectors. But... was he imagining it, or were there _three_ groups all shooting at each other?

"We can follow the ridge and then cut through those trees," she suggested. "Then make a break for the door."

"Or we could cover Tom and his guys from up here and see if we can't even things out a bit." Wyatt glanced off to his left, and thought he glimpsed Flynn a couple hundred yards away. "Maybe even catch them in a crossfire."

Jess shrugged, and aimed over the top of the ridge.

"Hey, some of these guys are ours," Wyatt added. "Him, and—"

"Tom defected?"

"You know him, huh?"

"I spent months with him in the 1930s. Always thought he was too nice for his own good."

"— and the guys with him."

They opened fire. The Rittengoons had to scatter for better cover, because he and Jessica were shooting from a different angle than Tom and his guys. Both groups shrunk towards the building, which also brought them closer to each other. Maybe they'd take each other out and the time team would get lucky.

Not that lucky, though. Wyatt didn't see Emma.

"Any idea why those other two groups are shooting at each other?" he asked when he dropped back to reload.

"Keynes and Cahills."

"I thought they were on the same side."

"It's complicated." She shook her head. "If Emma and Benjamin Cahill are at war—"

"They're not," Wyatt told her, aiming and sending a Rittengoon scurrying a little farther into cover. "Emma killed him right after we got here."

Jessica looked up quickly, actually taking her eyes off the battle below. And the look on her face... it was something more profound than relief.

Wyatt grimaced. It was like Agent Christopher had said: Jessica had made her choices as an adult, and she'd have to pay for it. But at the same time, the image of Benjamin Cahill _taping the wrists_ of a nine-year-old Jess, _any_ Jess, and _throwing her in the back of a car_ had given Wyatt nightmares.

That part they couldn't verify. They had only Jessica's word. On the other hand, Wyatt had absolutely no trouble believing it of Cahill.

"She tried to kill Lucy, he jumped in front of the bullet," he added.

Jessica's mouth formed an 'o.' Right. She'd been there when Carol had done pretty much the same thing, a little less literally.

Lucy's parents, fucking awful as they had been, had each been willing to die for her. Marian and Carl... well, they would've died for Jessica too, but they sure hadn't been able to protect her.

All this could wait. They had a war to win.

He glanced over to where he'd seen Flynn, and now saw Lucy. Except she wasn't focusing on the battle, she was—

Covering Flynn and Rufus as they rushed for the main building. If Rufus could get the Lifeboat out of there, they could all pull out and wait for Homeland Security to arrive.

The two of them got cut off, pinned down behind a low group of boulders. Wyatt grimaced, and tried to kill their attacker, but he didn't have the right angle. Lucy did, but she wasn't a good enough—

Jessica glanced off to their right, swore, rolled a few feet down the slope, and took off at a run.

"Jessica!" he yelled. She didn't stop or look back. What the hell? He searched the area but didn't see any immediate threat. Not anyone off to their right, either—

Lucy's missed shots had still driven one of Flynn and Rufus's attackers into Wyatt's line of fire. He killed the man. Immediately Flynn and Rufus broke cover and ran—

He saw Flynn glance off to his right, leap forward, bodily tackle Rufus to the ground, and jerk as the bullet hit.

Shit, Lucy had seen, too. She— oh, God, she _broke_ cover, dropping over the top of the little hill and sliding halfway down— carrying a _bow_ —

Oh, God, she was actually gonna charge out there, wasn't she?

Grimly, Wyatt shifted to do his dead level best to cover her.

Sudden movement off to his left distracted him. New people, a _lot_ of new people. And Lucy was—

Wyatt was halfway up the lip of the hill when he recognized Agent Christopher right there in front. He looked closer.

The cavalry had arrived.

#

If his teammates could stop scaring the shit out of him, that would be great.

First Flynn had sent him sprawling face-first into the ground. Rufus had been so shocked— had they all misunderstood Flynn after all, was Rufus about to die for that mistake?— he hadn't understood what it meant to have Flynn shudder like that. Flynn's low groan had clued Rufus in. Which— okay, stuck on a battlefield, wounded teammate, bullets flying, he needed to get them both out of there—

Flynn had managed to move himself, taking cover behind the nearest pile of rocks, hand pressed to his side.

"Did you just take a _bullet_ for me?" Rufus had demanded.

Flynn winced. "We're even for Chicago now, right?"

"I dunno, man, in Chicago there was a lot of blood and—"

Flynn moved his hand.

"Oh my God. Oh my— yes, we are even for Chicago now. I can't believe I'm saying this, Flynn, please don't die—"

"It's a graze," Flynn grunted. "Didn't stick."

Then Lucy appeared out of nowhere and dropped to her knees beside Flynn. This little space behind the rocks was getting really crowded. "Garcia!"

They'd left her up on the hill, so she'd definitely charged across the same battlefield Flynn and Rufus had just crossed so carefully, which was another year or so off Rufus's life just thinking about it.

"A graze, Lucy," Flynn repeated. "I'll be all right."

Lucy tugged his shirt up to look for herself, and only turned really pale, which said a lot about how far they'd all come. She ungracefully tumbled onto her side and tried to _kiss_ Flynn— which— Rufus might've gotten used to them being a thing but he still kind of wanted to cover his delicate, delicate eyes— and that worked for like half a second before Flynn hissed in pain and pulled away.

Plus they were, you know, still in the middle of a firefight.

And then— and then Rufus realized the shooting had stopped. "Uh, guys..."

"It's Denise," Lucy said with relief.

Yes, with a cavalcade of Homeland Security agents with her, most of them dirty and bruised and worse for the wear, but very armed, very determined, and pretty pissed off. But the other side wasn't just lying down and rolling over. Denise was calling orders at them through a bullhorn, but it looked increasingly like the shooting was about to start again.

"Okay." Lucy glanced back the way she'd come. "Rufus, cover me."

"Um, okay...? What are you doing?" She had a very resolute look on her face.

She left without answering. As Flynn pulled off his undershirt and wadded it up against his side, Rufus knelt behind the rocks and tried to watch in all directions at once. At least they had their back to the building... except someone could come out of the building and shoot them, too. Fun.

"You're seriously not going to die?" he added, sparing a glance at Flynn. "'cause, I don't get you and Lucy, but man, she's suffered enough."

"I'll die someday, but it's probably not going to be today."

"Hey, um," Rufus said after a minute. "Should someone tell Agent Christopher Emma and Cahill are both dead? Might help her negotiations."

"Lucy's got that covered."

"What?" He looked over his shoulder to see Lucy shove Emma's dead body over the top of the hill where it would be visible.

"... yeah, that's not disturbing at all," he muttered.

But macabre as Lucy's idea was, it did help. Reluctantly, a few Rittenhouse agents stood up. Then a few more. Wyatt had come down from the opposite ridge, so he'd hopefully told Agent Christopher that that one group was on their side. None of the Homeland Security weapons were aimed in their direction, so... probably.

Lucy, Wyatt, Flynn... where was...

He stood. "I'm going to go look for—"

"NOBODY MOVE!"

Rufus looked up at the ridge. His stomach clenched. Jiya... with a Rittengoon holding her at gunpoint.

No. _No_.

"THESE ARE MY DEMANDS," the goon yelled. "OR I SHOOT YOUR PILOT."

Rufus couldn't see Jiya's expression from here, but her body language was _furious_. "IT'S NOT WORTH IT!" she yelled. "DON'T—"

Her cry of pain as the guy twisted her arm behind her back echoed down through the valley. Rufus found himself raising the gun without thinking about it.

"You don't have the shot, Rufus," Flynn said quietly.

"Damn it, you think I'm just going to—"

Someone stepped out of hiding near Jiya and the goon. The girl. The other pilot. Judith.

Whatever she said was too faint to hear, but the goon looked perturbed. His attention was on her now. Rufus shifted closer. The two went back and forth—

One shot. Rufus started sprinting—

The Rittengoon toppled over the ridge and fell to the ground below. Someone with a gun was standing not too far from him, who looked a lot like... "Is that _Jessica?_ Logan?"

Lucy and Flynn looked equally perplexed.

He didn't stop to discuss it, just started running again. He met Jiya— and Judith and Jessica, the weird alliterative club or whatever— on their way down. He ignored the other two, grabbed Jiya, and kissed the hell out of her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him closely and fiercely and gave as good as she got.

"This is normal, in the twenty-first century," Jessica told Judith after several moments. "In case you were wondering."

"I'd... figured that out."

Finally, reluctantly, he and Jiya pulled away from each other.

"Emma's dead," he told her. "And her people are surrendering."

They looked at each other, but neither of them had the guts to ask out loud if that meant it was over.

"Then let's get to the Lifeboat," Jiya said. "And see what kind of shape the Mothership's in."

Right. If there was any chance of making it operational, they couldn't leave it here. Hell, either way, they couldn't leave it here.

He kissed her again anyway. He didn't dare say, _I think we might have won. Not yet_. But when they separated, this time, he could tell she was thinking it, too.

#

The two Wyoming bases were compromised, so they all ended up at the Nebraska base. With seventeen adults, one baby, and two time machines, the house bulged at the seams.

Rufus and Jiya moved in with Lucy and Garcia, taking Lucy's old bottom bunk; Lucy moved to the bunk above Garcia; and Judith took the last bunk. Lucy couldn't really share with Garcia thanks to his healing side, and besides...

She didn't know about him, but she felt strangely shy doing that in front of others.

Could they— just have _time_ , in private, to figure out what they were and what they were doing, absent tragedy and heartache? Or was that too much to ask?

Lucy was terrified it might be too much to ask. Because if the fight really was over... what happened to Garcia?

She didn't know. Denise, when cornered, didn't know.

"Garcia doesn't deserve to go back to prison," Lucy insisted.

"I agree." Denise looked haggard. "We'll see if my superiors see it the same way."

"If they don't—"

A small, grim smile tugged at the corner of Denise's mouth. "Lucy, please don't make any actionable treasonous statements."

Lucy subsided. And considered that, if Garcia's fate was up for debate... Denise's own fate might also be.

The whole team's might be. _Was_.

The fate of the time machines was also in the hands of Denise's superiors. Unless they decided to keep the time machines for nefarious government purposes, in which case, their fate would be in the hands of the team. Specifically, the team would be holding sledgehammers. Which went right back to them being thrown in prison for treason.

The days felt strange. She couldn't believe it was over, though Homeland Security wasn't seeing any new Rittenhouse activity since the battle. And when she could manage to believe it was over, she wasn't sure what came next. What did any of them have left?

Well, Wyatt had his daughter. Lucy sat in the kitchen and watched him making up a bottle. Denise had found another safe house for the Carlins and Codys and they'd left that morning, leaving the house with only _twelve_ people sharing two bathrooms. But Grace had stayed. And so had Jessica, having basically given Denise her parole.

Her fate was up in the air, too. Maybe letting her stay here with her daughter for a few days was a kindness if what she had ahead of her was years of federal prison. Every time Lucy saw her with Grace, she looked... exhausted, but radiant. Much like Wyatt had, right after Grace's birth.

"We saw some amazing things," Lucy admitted to Wyatt.

Wyatt looked over at her. "You're gonna miss it."

"Well... some of it." She wouldn't miss the danger, or the overt discrimination most of them had experienced in the past, or peeing outdoors. Or dealing with having her period in the 19 th  century.

But... meeting people like Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker and Harry Houdini? Seeing history up close? She was afraid she would miss that desperately.

She would also miss the team desperately. They were all she had left.

She and Garcia and Rufus and Jiya were all in one room, but with Wyatt busy looking after Grace, it felt like the beginning of the end already. What would any of them return to afterwards, even if it wasn't prison?

But it was so easy to focus on what it felt like they were losing, and not what they still had. Somehow, they'd all made it. Improbably. It could so easily have been otherwise.

"Hey." She got up and went over to Wyatt, sliding her arms around him. "I'm glad you're here."

He put the bottle down and hugged her back. "Me too," he muttered against her shoulder. "Me too, Lucy."

Denise found Lucy later that day, in between extensive conference calls in the Lifeboat garage from which they were all barred. "Is this about—" Lucy began.

"It's about Amy," Denise said.

Lucy swallowed.

"I've been trying to determine what Emma might have done on your mother's orders to erase her." Denise handed Lucy a manila folder. "In this timeline, your mother had her tubes tied right after you were born. Henry Wallace didn't go to Berkeley; he went to Dartmouth—"

"One of my mother's childhood friends went to Dartmouth in the late seventies," Lucy muttered. "Mom visited her there once and described it as a 'repugnant cesspit of testosterone and alcohol.' No way she'd look twice at a guy from Dartmouth."

"— well, whatever happened to Henry in Dartmouth, _he_ had a vasectomy."

Lucy frowned. "In the seventies?"

Denise nodded.

Lucy shook her head. "I really, really don't want to know what Emma did to pull that one off."

"Then, once he married Elizabeth Merrick, they adopted three children from foster care. A sibling group that had been waiting for a family for three years."

"So, to recap," Lucy said. "I'd have to go back, keep my mother from having a tubal and keep Henry in California. In which case these kids go back to languishing in the foster care system."

"Pretty much."

Lucy wasn't surprised any more at this latest blow. It... had been a while since she'd truly believed she might bring Emma back. But it _was_ a blow.

And all because Mom had wanted to avoid lung cancer so she could have time to indoctrinate Lucy. "And it probably didn't occur to either of them that Emma could just... get my dad to stop smoking. A few well-placed graphic photos of diseased lungs, Mom stays healthy, and Amy's still born."

"I'm sorry, Lucy," Denise said after a minute.

Lucy nodded. "Me too."

She found herself wanting to talk to Garcia. He knew what it felt like to have some long-expected loss finally become very real. But when she found him, he was deep in conversation with Judith, the young pilot Emma had trained. Judith looked upset. Garcia looked pained.

He joined her, later, as she sat by the back door with a book. "Everything okay?" she asked, after a few quiet minutes.

It was a few more before he spoke. "The, uh, last straw for her was Emma telling her what happened when she piloted the Cahill team to Zagreb."

Lucy winced.

"... she wanted to apologize."

Lucy winced more.

"I tried to stop her. She, ah..." He licked his top lip and stared into the distance.

She, probably, had thought he was being _kind_ , not understanding he'd prefer to talk about nearly anything else.

"And you?" he added.

Lucy shrugged. "We can't get Amy back."

He exhaled quietly. She reached out and took his hand in an awkward sideways grip. They sat like that for a while.

She kind of wanted to say more, but they had no privacy.

The next day, the bureaucrat arrived. His name wasn't a household one... but his boss's was.

The team was waiting for him in the Lifeboat garage, where they'd been spending most of their time lately, arranged around and behind the couch. Wyatt was just casually between him, and Jessica and Grace. Lucy was, similarly, just casually between him and Garcia. Everyone was, just casually, between him and both time machines.

They all knew he was there to interrogate them. They all knew his recommendations would go up the chain to the people responsible for deciding what happened to them.

He talked to each of them one by one, in one of the bedrooms hastily cleared for that purpose. When it was Lucy's turn, she sat awkwardly on the lower bunk, and faced him, sitting at the desk.

"Ah, Miss Preston." He had not checked his notes.

Lucy tried to give him a polite smile. She was afraid it came out as a pained grimace.

"Excuse me, that should be Doctor Preston, shouldn't it?"

"Yes."

They looked at each other. Lucy wasn't sure if that had been some kind of test, and if so, which of them had passed. Or failed.

"Agent Christopher has already given very detailed reports," he continued. "I just have a few questions."

The specificity of his questions proved the truth of _very detailed_. Lucy could tell there was more going on than just the questions themselves, but... Wyatt would have been able to explain this kind of psychological probe. She couldn't.

Finally, he had no more questions. "My condolences on your recent losses, Doctor Preston."

Lucy swallowed, aware he was watching her closely. "Thank you."

"That will be all."

"No," she said. "It won't."

He raised his eyebrows politely.

"You haven't asked me what I think should happen to the team. And you probably don't care. But Jessica Logan doesn't deserve to be in prison. I never wanted to learn how Rittenhouse coerces its people, but I did. They replaced her family, and then they used those ties, _and_ threats against her original family, to get her to do whatever they wanted."

"I've heard her interrogations—"

"Despite being basically brainwashed, she walked away from them. She came in with valuable intel that helped Homeland Security hunt Rittenhouse down. And then she saved her own family _and_ Rufus Carlin's family _and_ I don't know how many Homeland Security agents, after one of their own sold them out, at great personal risk, when she could've just run and never looked back."

"I—"

"Her life was almost my life. I am almost the only person in the world who could tell you what it's like, and what I know pales in comparison to what actually happened to her. Nor does Garcia Flynn deserve to be in prison."

He looked startled by the subject change.

"As I'm sure you're aware, the original charges against him were concocted by Rittenhouse, manipulating the American justice system for their own ends. The worst of what he's alleged to have done has no evidence except for eyewitness testimony that would be far too explosive to ever introduce into any kind of courtroom. As for what he was actually convicted of, his sacrifices in this fight have more than repaid his debt."

"You think the families of the dead guards at Connor Mason's headquarters would agree?"

"If they knew the full truth? I think they would."

The man smiled faintly. "Is this your way of saying you'd refuse to testify against Mr. Flynn?"

"I'd happily tell any jury about his actions in the present. He's taken bullets for the team on multiple occasions. And, of course... I couldn't possibly _credibly_ testify about anything besides the present."

The man's eyes narrowed. He was silent. Lucy realized he was waiting to make sure she was really done. "Thank you, Doctor Preston."

Lucy left.

So, after a long day, did the aide, whisked away by the same cadre of Homeland Security agents that had brought him and guarded him. He'd spoken with every member of the team, plus Jessica. He'd also talked to Tom, Peter, Ezekiel, and Judith, the four survivors of the groups Emma had taken from the past. Asking them what they wanted, probably. Tom had been upfront about not wanting to go back to the nineteenth century, even if that were an option. Lucy didn't know what the other three wanted, and she wasn't sure _they_ knew, either.

Just four survivors, from all the people Emma had talked into coming with her. _Four_.

More than ever, Lucy regretted those missed shots in the alleyway in Chinatown. Except... if she'd succeeded in killing Emma, rescuing Rufus without undoing that would've been a lot more complicated. Maybe, in the end, it hadn't mattered at all. That was not a reassuring thought.

When she came back from the bathroom and rejoined the team in the Lifeboat garage, Rufus and Jiya were having a spirited argument about their favorite time period. Neither of them had exactly had great experiences in the past, but Lucy didn't think much of it until she saw the crates of emergency supplies that had casually made their way into the Lifeboat. And the repaired Mothership.

She looked up, and saw Wyatt watching her.

She sat beside him. Grace was sleeping against Jessica's chest right now. "So, uh," Lucy said after a minute. "Got any solar panels in there, or is the plan for Rufus and Jiya to set up a foundry on-site?"

She tried to keep her tone light.

"The first one," he said after a minute. "The plan is, uh, to use most of the Mothership space for cargo."

"How on earth did you convince Rufus and Jiya?" They had the most to lose here, and the least to gain... elsewhere. Elsewhen.

"They didn't need any convincing. They don't want the time machines falling into the wrong hands. Neither does Connor."

She shook her head slowly. It was absurd. It was an absurd plan and they shouldn't have to _do_ it. Not after giving up everything to save the world.

"Rufus and Jiya were thinking they could, uh, use the Time Warp to make surgical strikes, tweak little things until it was safe to come back," Wyatt added.

She looked at him. "You know this is completely crazy, right? Planning to go on the run from the government, through time?"

"Does that mean you don't want the seat we're saving for you?"

"What a choice," she muttered. "Go to prison in the present, or die of typhoid or dysentery or yellow fever or smallpox in the past. Or die in childbirth. Or of a simple infection." She looked up at him. "I... get why Jessica would want to go. But, Wyatt, you could stay here with Grace. Raise her where it's safe."

After a minute, Wyatt said, "We figured... if they come for him, Flynn wouldn't have any problem going. And, uh... if he goes, you'd go."

Lucy didn't answer, because she couldn't.

"And if the whole team goes?" He shook his head. "You're all I have now."

"You have your daughter."

"C'mon. The whole team goes, what're the odds the government doesn't figure I was involved and come after me too? What kind of a life would she have?"

Lucy shook her head.

That evening, as she climbed the ladder to the top bunk, she said, "So, everyone knew about this go hide in the past plan except for me?"

Rufus and Jiya looked up from where they'd been... getting comfortable together. From which she'd been politely averting her eyes. Garcia was inscrutable.

"We were thinking the thirties," Rufus said after a minute. "Right as the Depression hits. Buy up some cheap land and keep our heads down. And take a stock of antibiotics to last us until they're invented."

"If we use the Time Warp,"Jiya added, "it won't matter that we've made, what, fourteen jumps since then?"

"You're both _programmers_ ," Lucy said. "Rufus, you _hate_ roughing it. You'd be miserable living in the past without— without—"

"I would," Rufus admitted frankly. "But if it's this or let someone remake history the way they want it? We can't let them do that any more than we could let Rittenhouse."

"We talked about just smashing the machines," Jiya added. "But we weren't sure we could do it thoroughly enough to be safe, and they could always threaten us— threaten our families— to get us to fix it. If we're going to have to go on the run anyway, might as well be in the past where we know they'd never find us."

"How the hell did it come to this," Lucy muttered.

"Hey, maybe it won't," Rufus said. "Maybe, the... government will... do the right thing. Wow, that sounded a lot more convincing before I said it out loud."

Lucy leaned over the edge and looked down at Garcia. "Are you on board with this?" she asked, when he didn't answer her obvious question.

He took his time. "If it's this or prison? Yeah."

She breathed out slowly. Would _she_ stay here, alone, if Rufus and Jiya and Wyatt and Garcia all went?

She knew the answer to that. They were all she had left. Whatever happened, they stuck together.

Judith found Lucy the next day, as she was washing the dishes. Lucy smiled at her. "How are you doing?"

"I'm well, thank you." It seemed like an automatic response, prompted by firsthand knowledge of just how much worse things could be. "May I help?"

"You can dry if you want. There's a towel—"

"I know."

They worked in silence for a few moments before Judith blurted, "There's nothing wrong with farming. It's an honest life."

Lucy looked over at her. "I know."

"But I—" Judith hesitated. She snuck a sideways look at Lucy's face. "I want more."

"What kind of more?" Lucy asked after a minute or two.

"After what I've seen? After what I've _done?_ I'm not sure I can go back home. Back to my family. And— and I miss them, but..." She bit her lip. "I'm not sure I _want_ to go back," she whispered. "Does that make me selfish?"

"No," Lucy said immediately. "No, Judith. It doesn't. You're right, farming is an honest life and there's no shame in it. But it's a _hard_ life and maybe it's not the life you're best at. You learned to pilot the time machine, which means you're incredibly smart. You... Judith, you could do a lot of things."

Judith blushed, and looked pleased, though she bit back her smile until it was small. "My mother would say it was immodest of me to agree."

"Maybe, but I'm sure your mother is also very proud to have a daughter like you."

"She says I'm willful."

"Well, you have to be willful, don't you, on that tough Nebraska prairie?"

"I miss her," Judith said wistfully after a minute.

"I bet."

"I wish I could—" She broke off. "Do you think I'm sinful? That even though I miss my family, I'm not sure I want to go back? They think I'm _dead_."

Lucy swallowed past the lump in her throat. "You're not sinful," she told her quietly. "And you're not selfish. What good will you do anyone if you die of dysentery, or... or any of the many things you could die young from?"

"Medicine here is amazing," Judith admitted.

"Don't hide your light under a bushel, right?" Lucy asked. "You could do a lot of good if you went back. I'm sure you could. But you could also do a lot of good here." She hesitated. "Your parents want the best for you, right?"

Not something you could take for granted.

"I think so."

The faint uncertainty in Judith's voice tugged at Lucy's heart, and made her even more certain the twenty-first century was the place for this girl. "Then I'm sure they'd understand if you stayed where you could have a better life." She hesitated. "But it has to be up to you. If you want to go back to where it's familiar? Judith... there's no shame in that either."

Judith looked up at her. "Thank you," she said shyly.

"Any time." Lucy gave her another smile.

"... are you and Mr. Flynn courting?"

Lucy managed not to choke on air. "I'm not sure," she admitted after a minute. "Sometimes I think so."

Judith shook her head. "I'm sorry. That was impertinent. I was just— curious..."

"It's all right." And Lucy found that it was, coming from this girl who was trying to make sense of everything she saw around her.

"Emma told me that I erased his family," Judith said.

 _Of course_ Emma had said that. "That's not true. Rittenhouse murdered his family. When— the Cahills went back, they were going to bring them back. But we found out that if that happened, Rittenhouse would win—"

"I know. He told me all of that."

That shouldn't have surprised Lucy. But the thought of Garcia painstakingly explaining all this to Judith to keep her from self-flagellating made something twist painfully in Lucy's own chest.

"If it hadn't been you, it would've been someone else," Lucy added.

"They... threatened me, you know."

"I'm not surprised."

"They said— well, you don't need to know."

"If it helps to talk about it, I'm happy to— Okay, no, then." Judith had shuddered visibly. "If you ever change your mind, I'm here."

"Thank you," Judith said again.

"Any time," Lucy said again.

For a little while, her own heart felt lighter.

They were all in the Lifeboat garage when Denise got a call.

Something about her demeanor, the way she straightened, tipped Lucy off that this was important. Rufus, looking at Lucy, turned to look at Denise, and Jiya followed his gaze, and...

They all watched her.

"Yes, sir," she said quietly, several times. She hung up. When she turned, she had tears in her eyes.

"I was told, and I quote," she said. "'Send these tired people home.'"

Lucy heard a slow exhale, the sound of someone else relaxing. "All of us?" she asked.

"All of us."

"That... includes you, right?"

Denise smiled. "Me too."

Tension Lucy hadn't known she was carrying dropped out of her shoulders. She felt stunned. Looking around, she wasn't the only one.

"What about the time machines?" Rufus asked.

"After the soldiers and Judith make their decision, they're to be decommissioned. And you—" She looked at Connor. "Are to be _strongly encouraged_ to find a new line of inventing."

"That's not disconcerting at all coming from Homeland Security," Connor muttered, but he was smiling.

"So get those crates that I've pretending not to see for the last three days out of the time machines," Denise added. "Before someone else sees them."

A slow smile spread across Wyatt's face. "Yes, ma'am."

#

_Send these people home_ prompted questions that none of them knew how to answer.

It was easiest for Rufus and Jiya. Angela and Kevin had been let back in their house a few days earlier. Rufus and Jiya would stay there while they looked for new jobs and just generally tried to figure out what to do.

Denise offered Connor her guest bedroom while he answered that same question. Forfeiting what Rittenhouse had given him had left him bankrupt, and he basically had the clothes on his back and the few things he'd brought to the bunker— a far cry from his former riches. But he was oddly untroubled.

"I have my ideas," he said, when Wyatt made the same observation as Lucy, out loud and less tactfully. "That's the only form of wealth that _really_ matters. Well." He looked around and smiled. "That, and friends and family. The rest will return."

"Any idea what you're going to work on?" Lucy asked.

Connor hesitated. "I got into all this because I wanted to build my mother a better vacuum cleaner. I wanted to _help_ people. Surprising, I know. But I think maybe it's time to return to that."

Jessica was going to move in with her brother for a while. Or rather, they were going to find a new place together. As a bartender, she'd be able to find work pretty easily, if she could explain her months-long employment gap. Childcare would be harder. "But, you know," she admitted to Lucy. "After leaving a psychopathic cult? I'm kind of looking forward to _normal_ challenges."

She hesitated, and glanced up. "Denise told me you argued with DHS to keep me out of prison. I, um... don't think I deserved that. But... thank you, Lucy."

"Just... have a good life, okay?" Lucy said after a minute. "Take good care of Grace."

Jessica swallowed. "That goes without saying." Her voice was rough. She hesitated again. "Can I... give you a hug, or no?"

Lucy looked at her.

"That's a no. Okay—"

Lucy reached out and put her arms around Jessica. Jessica made a surprised noise, and it was a little awkward, but Lucy didn't regret it.

In theory, Wyatt just had to report to Camp Pendleton for a new assignment. But when Lucy found him in the living room, his frown showed he pretty clearly didn't think it was that simple.

"Hey," she said softly, sitting down beside him.

He glanced up and gave her a half-smile. "Hey, Lucy."

"Penny for your thoughts," she said after a minute.

He sighed. "I'm thinking... that when me and my Jessica talked about having kids, the idea was always that, you know, I'd be... I'd be _here_ when I was here, but I'd still be deploying."

"And now?" she prompted.

"After everything? I'm not sure that's enough for me."

"Are you thinking of getting out?"

"No," he said immediately. Then he frowned at his own vehemence. "I don't think so." He looked up. "But it's not fair to stick Jessica with..."

"The majority of the child-raising."

"Yeah." After a minute, he shook his head. "What about you?"

"I'm going back to... to my mother's house, for now." Lucy wasn't sure what else to do. "And, um. Homeland Security asked me to be the liaison for—"

"The three who are staying?"

Lucy nodded. Judith had decided to stay in the twenty-first century. Tom was staying, as expected. And consumption ran in Peter's family, apparently, and the appeal of modern treatment for tuberculosis had decided him. But Zeke was returning to his wife and kids. Rufus would be dropping him off near Valentine the day after the blizzard ended. Lucy had provided him with plenty of historical details to make up a convincing explanation for why he'd survived the blizzard when no one else had... and when so many of the bodies had disappeared.

"Using historical knowledge to help people? Sounds like the perfect job for you."

Lucy smiled. "I know." They'd all spent enough time in this century that they had basic things like modern plumbing and the outward tenets of gender and racial equality down. It was other things she'd help them with: navigating modern society, finding their place in it, understanding all the changes of the last hundred and twenty five years.

"Anything else? You going back to—"

"I'll have to find something. Homeland Security's not paying me, and... I assume I'll have access to my mom's savings, unless those were frozen, but that won't last forever. But I don't know what I'm going to do. Stanford probably thinks I'm dead at this point."

"Hey." He put his hand on her shoulder. "Whatever you end up doing, you're gonna be great at it."

"I was thinking of becoming a circus acrobat," she said, just to see him wince.

"You know what I mean."

She smiled at him. "I do. Thank you."

"What about, uh—"

"I do have all those book ideas I came up with." She barreled on like she hadn't heard him. "The one you suggested, history's forgotten heroes. Plus I had a similar idea when we were in Chicago: the unseen domestic labor behind the country's great social justice movements. Maybe I could..." She winced. "Adjunct for a little while, stretch out Mom's savings, and get one of those books out. Then I could pretend the huge gap on my CV was a writing sabbatical."

"Send me an autographed copy," Wyatt said.

"You know this isn't goodbye, right?" Lucy said. "We're not saying goodbye this time."

Wyatt looked at her like she was crazy. "Why would I say goodbye to my best friends?"

She leaned forward and hugged him fiercely.

Later that day, she found Garcia in their bedroom. Rufus and Jiya weren't there.

He'd already packed, which was easy considering how little he had. Now he was putting her books in boxes. He looked up when she came in. "I, uhhh..."

"That's very thoughtful of you. Unless you were thinking of stealing them, in which case you're going to regret teaching me how to spar."

He gave her a small smile.

She moved to stand in front of him, quite close to him, and waited until he put the books down and turned to her. "Come home with me?" she asked quietly.

His hesitation disappointed her, because she knew he didn't have anywhere else to go. But it didn't surprise her. Not after everything. This couldn't be easy, apparently.

"I appreciate the offer," he said carefully. "I have, uh, a few things to... take care of first. Agent Christopher is, uh..." He licked his lip. "Can I take a raincheck?"

"Depends. Are you killing anyone?"

"I'm not doing anything illegal."

"So that's a no?"

He bit back a smile. "That's a no," he agreed.

"Are we talking weeks, months, or years?"

_Days. Days would be good. Maybe hours._

"Not more than a few weeks."

"Then... you know where I'll be."

"Okay." His voice had gone husky.

They looked at each other for a moment. He reached carefully for her, and slid his hand behind her neck. She stretched up to wrap her arms around his own neck—

"Oh, sorry," Rufus said behind them. Lucy _jumped_. "I'll come back when you're, uh, done."

He closed the door. Garcia closed his eyes, biting back a rueful smile. Lucy dropped back to the flats of her feet. "I think if we looked under the bed we might find the shattered remains of that moment," she muttered.

Garcia snorted, and despite everything... it was nice to see him smiling again.

That night, she crawled in beside him, not caring any more that Rufus and Jiya were there. She slept against his good side, with his arm around her. When he stirred, it seemed like an obscenely early hour.

"You're leaving _now?_ " she muttered.

"Yeah."

She looked up at him, but he wasn't looking at her. Lucy glanced over his shoulder and saw Rufus closing the eye he'd cracked open.

Seriously?

So Lucy shrugged into her robe and padded after Garcia into the living room. But they had no privacy there, either; Wyatt was walking with Grace, trying to keep her quiet, and Jessica was trying to carry on a conversation through her yawns, something about a schedule.

And it wasn't that Garcia or Lucy was _shy_... but a moment like this was fraught enough without adding other people's attention to the list of possible threats.

So Garcia turned to her at the front door. He studied her for a moment, expression warm and rueful. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, lips lingering a moment. Lucy was reminded absurdly of the Wizard of Oz. "Goodbye, Lucy," he said quietly. And then he was gone.

Lucy stared after the departing car, between the kiss, and his words, suddenly filled with foreboding that...

"Wait," Jessica said sleepily behind her. "Wait, was that a _goodbye_ goodbye?"

Reluctantly, Lucy turned.

"Did you guys—" Wyatt looked indignant. "Where the hell does he think he's going?"

Lucy couldn't help smiling at that. He had the grace to look a little abashed. "It's not like that, Wyatt," she said. "It's... never been like that."

" _What?_ " Wyatt stared at her like she'd grown a second head.

"Ooookay," Jessica said. "I'm going to go walk, um... in the other garage—"

"No," Lucy said. "No, it's fine, I'm going back to bed—"

"You're telling me you and him've been, what, platonic roommates this whole _time?_ "

 _Define 'platonic.'_ "Sort of?"

Wyatt looked like he had no idea what to say. And Lucy loved him, she did— which was a miracle in itself, that they'd come back to that— but she didn't have the energy for this right now.

She went back to bed, wrapped in a blanket that smelled like Garcia.

#

Lucy flew home with Denise, and it was Denise who drove her to her mom's house. She even suggested they stop on the way for a few groceries.

"The house has been searched and cleared," Denise told her. "Several times over."

Lucy nodded. Denise had told her before.

"Are you sure you won't take our couch tonight?"

"Thank you, I'll be fine."

"And you're sure you don't want company?"

Lucy smiled at that. Their relationship couldn't, thank God, be reduced to parent and child. But there was something comforting about having an older, steadier person palpably invested in Lucy's well-being. "Yes," Lucy said. "Go home. You've more than earned it."

"I'm going to be rude and invite myself in anyway."

Lucy supposed Denise had earned that, too.

She was glad not to be alone after she made it through the front hallway, into the kitchen where...

She found herself staring at the floor.

Denise kept close behind her, not touching her. "Lucy?" she prompted gently after a minute.

Lucy cleared her throat. "It's, uh... cleaned up." She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting. Withered flowers nearly a year old? Wine stains?

"Yes," Denise said, still gentle. "The agents who swept for evidence put things to right."

Lucy swallowed, and nodded.

This war had hardened her until sometimes she didn't recognize herself. She hadn't thought this would affect her this much. Or had she thought it would be worse?

"You sure you want to stay here, Lucy?" Denise asked after a minute.

Lucy was wrapped up in trying not to break, and the truth slipped out: "I don't have anywhere else to go."

"That's not true." Even Denise's reproach was gentle. "You can stay with us. Angela and Rufus would be happy to take you in. Even... Wyatt, if you don't mind Grace."

Lucy nodded slowly. "But, someday." Her voice came out think. "I'm still gonna have to come back here and face this place."

"Then why don't I go over it with you," Denise suggested after a minute.

At first, Lucy felt stupid, to have Denise walk through the house with her, upstairs and downstairs and the basement. Then she felt intensely grateful not to be alone.

"My sister's pictures used to be here," she murmured, pointing to the wall above the stairwell. "Now it's just me."

She stopped Denise before she pushed open the door to Lucy's mom's room, which currently stood half-open. "We don't need to go in there."

Denise gave her a look, but didn't say anything.

They finished in Lucy's room. "Where do you keep the sheets?" Denise asked, when Lucy just stopped a few feet from the doorway and stared.

"Uh... hall closet."

Lucy was too transfixed by the juxtaposition of how familiar the room was, and how different she was from the person she'd been last time she stood here, to wonder, until Denise came back with a stack of sheets. "Give me a hand?"

So they changed the sheets, and bundled the old ones into the hamper. "Oddly enough, this... helps," Lucy admitted. "Thanks."

"Lucy, I really don't like the idea of you here all by yourself."

Lucy took a deep breath. "I know," she said. "Thank you. But... if I go anywhere else, I'll just be delaying the inevitable."

Denise studied her for a few moments.

"Besides," Lucy added, trying for a light tone. "This is where I told Garcia he could find me."

Denise seemed to be trying to hold in a smile. "Lucy, not that that should be your primary concern anyway, but I have _seen_ the way Garcia Flynn looks at you. You can't tell me he wouldn't be the first to say you should get out of here if it's not good for you."

"I will," Lucy promised. Then: "Wait. Do you know where he is?"

Denise hesitated. "I have a general idea."

Lucy fought against the temptation to ask.

"The government wouldn't exactly have been pleased if he just disappeared without a trace," Denise added wryly. Her expression softened. "I don't know if he's coming back, Lucy, because he's the only one who can determine that. But he's not in the wind."

"Okay."

They went back downstairs. Denise was clearly reluctant to leave Lucy there, but also clearly determined to respect her autonomy. "Call me if you need anything."

"I will."

"Even if it's just to talk."

"Yes."

"Even if it's two in the morning."

"Okay."

"Promise."

Lucy smiled reluctantly. "I promise."

She hugged Denise, and then Denise left.

The house was very, very quiet.

Determinedly, Lucy unpacked her few things. The books would come later. She and Denise had already put away the groceries, so she didn't have the excuse of doing that.

That killed ten minutes.

She wandered from room to room again, feeling as if she were in someone else's house and they'd gone on an extended vacation. She'd never be that person again, and right now she wasn't sure who she _could_ be. Maybe she would've been better off in a pleasantly bland hotel after all.

But whoever she was, she couldn't make a clean break with her past. That was impossible. Whoever she was now _was_ all the people she'd been before, just with... more. A lot more.

Her phone buzzed. _For any reason. I mean it_ , Denise had texted.

Lucy smiled.

Feeling like unpacking had been enough of a start, she settled down with a book she'd loved in childhood and tried to remember all the times Dad had read it to her. It took most of a bottle of wine for her to sleep, but she finally did. For a few hours.

#

Connor turned out to be the first person she called.

"Lucy?" He picked up on the second ring, sounding startled. "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, it's fine, just... do you have a minute?"

"Of course."

She hesitated. "You know what it's like to start over with nothing," she said quietly.

"Well, I'm finding out." He sounded wry.

"How do you do it?"

He hesitated. "Pick my favorite things out of my old life and figure out how to get more of them, I suppose."

Lucy was taken aback. That sounded deceptively simple. Was that all there was to it?

It sounded _audacious_.

"Do you want to meet for lunch?" he added. "Or has your social calendar already filled up?" He sounded hesitant, perhaps not used to being on the outskirts of anyone's priorities.

"I think I can squeeze you in."

It was good to see a familiar face, though she'd seen the others two days ago. They met at a little hole in the wall where Connor had a chance of staying anonymous. "You could, of course, do things my way," Connor said, as they waited for their food. "Crawl into a bottle for a few months and refuse to come out."

Lucy snorted into her coffee. "I think I'll pass."

Her conscience pricked her, though. She hadn't been paying much attention to Connor's own painful revival, back there in the bunker.

"It's terrifying," Connor admitted, fidgeting with his napkin. "But there's a strange sense of freedom, too. Don't you think?"

"What do you mean?"

He tilted his head. "When you've lost everything... you've also lost everything that was holding you back. Now, either of us can do whatever we want."

"Whatever we want that pays the bills."

"Well, yes."

"I don't know what I want," Lucy admitted after a minute. "For so long, it was always whatever my mother wanted." She shook her head. "Sorry. You're not a therapist."

"One of those might help."

"I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about it."

But lunch helped. Lucy went home wondering what she actually wanted to do, and spent the afternoon browsing academic job listings. It was the wrong time of the year; most departments had posted their openings earlier in the fall. But, even if she didn't see anything appealing, knowing what _didn't_ appeal to her was helpful.

She got a panicked early morning call from Judith and spent much of the next day going to thrift stores with her, having a running conversation about twenty-first century clothing norms, modesty, and Judith's own comfort. Helping someone else with their problems steadied her.

Halfway through, Wyatt called. She picked up immediately. "Hello?"

"Hey." He didn't sound tense.

"... how are you?"

"Um." That monosyllable managed to suggest the answer was complicated and maybe unfathomable. "You?"

"I asked first."

He snorted. "Listen... Rufus and Jiya are coming over tonight with takeout. Do—"

"Yes."

"Nothing fancy. My place isn't much—"

"Are you forgetting the bunker?"

"Fair point." She could hear the smile in his voice. "Seven good?"

"I'll see you then."

When he opened his door and took the beer she'd brought from her, the rush of familiarity disoriented her. She'd seen him three days before and yet...

And yet, right now, it felt like her old life was closing behind her. Which made no sense at all, because earlier in the day it had felt like her old life was completely lost to her.

Maybe it was the very normalcy of mundane things like shopping that felt like they could never belong to the Lucy who'd fought. And here she was, doing a normal thing— having dinner at someone's apartment— with three people with whom she'd share that war. No wonder it felt jarring.

She followed him to the kitchen and put the bag of takeout down. "Thai."

"Great." He handed her a beer. They sat in the sparse living room.

"Is it always hard?" she asked abruptly. "Coming home?"

He made a dark noise in the back of his throat. "Pretty much."

"... oh."

"Nothing feels familiar, does it?"

She closed her eyes against the prickle of tears at the sheer relief of his words. She shook her head.

Then she opened her eyes. "How are you?"

He hesitated. "I've had Grace for the last two days while Jessica and Kevin looked for an apartment."

"So, you're exhausted, but you haven't had time to dwell on it?"

"Pretty much." Another pause. "I'm heading to Pendleton in the morning. It's why I wanted us all to get together, in case..."

It was jarring when the disorienting familiarity twisted into something more openly strange. _The beginning of the end of the team_ , she thought again. Except it wasn't really the beginning any more.

Then Rufus and Jiya arrived, and the conversation turned to job searches and filling holes in resumes and CVs and getting used to the feeling that you could probably go outside without anyone trying to kill you. And it became clear that they all had in common this feeling of _what the hell next_ , which was deeply comforting.

"Do you think you'll stay around here?" Jiya asked Lucy.

Lucy's throat closed. "I don't know," she whispered, and then she had to press the napkins to her eyes to keep from crying. She didn't know why. It wasn't that she'd told Garcia she'd be here— they'd both known she hadn't meant forever. It wasn't the thought of leaving the place she'd lived nearly her whole life, where her family was deeply rooted. It wasn't the thought of piling on more unfamiliarity and making a fresh start. It was all of those, and none of them.

"Hey." Jiya put her arm around Lucy's shoulders. "It's gonna be all right," she said quietly.

She spent the next day helping Peter understand a bunch of things about modern rent and jobs and talking him out of a quiet, stiff-upper-lip existential crisis. In the afternoon, she checked job listings and searched the archives for Zeke; Rufus had taken him back that morning. She was afraid she'd found him, and he'd died of something that would've been completely preventable in the twenty-first century, just a year after going back.

The knock on the front door was so quiet, she barely heard it— She rushed across the house—

It was someone advertising a new cleaning service.

Lucy said polite things to them, shut the door, sat down on the bottom steps, and spent a while trying to figure out if she was going to cry or laugh. In the end, she just got up and made dinner.

#

Slowly it became a routine, though one populated by ghosts. Pretend that reading through jobs she didn't want constituted progress. Help Tom, Peter and Judith with whatever they needed. Talk to Rufus, or Wyatt, or sometimes both, on the phone. Wyatt was in a holding pattern, still, waiting for some paperwork related to the time team to clear. He was frustrated to not know, but relieved to have more time with Grace.

A front blew through, bringing wind and clouds and cold rain. It matched her mood. She curled up on the couch, tired and cramping, and tried to make an outline for a potential book. Someone knocked—

She opened the front door and found Garcia on her doorstep, holding a duffel bag and a cardboard box.

She saw him pick up on her startlement immediately. Before he could say anything, she held the door wide, prepared to haul him bodily inside if necessary.

It wasn't. But he stood right in the front entryway, not looking out of place, but looking like he felt out of place. He set the bag and the box down by the door.

They looked at each other.

"I— I'm glad you came," she got out. She stepped forward.

"Lucy..." He closed the distance between them, and cupped her face in his hand.

She stretched up on tiptoe, hands on his shoulders, but it wasn't enough; if he wanted this, he'd literally have to meet her in the middle.

He did.

Their first kiss had been desperate, their second, sad. This one had all the glad weariness of homecoming. He tilted his head, his mouth soft against hers, and made a gratifying startled noise of— relief. He cupped the back of her neck, his fingers warm against her skin, and— and...

Slowly, she felt the tension ease out of her.

A slow awareness set in of how uncomfortable she nevertheless was on tiptoe like this, and how uncomfortable he must be to be stooping. Reluctantly, she pulled away. She reached up and traced his mouth with her thumb. Then he pulled her against him and cradled her head against his chest, and murmured her name into her hair.

She leaned unabashedly against him.

Finally, she looked up at him again.

"You look done in," he said, voice low and rough.

"I'm all right."

Even his look of reproach was impossibly warm and soft.

"Better, now," she added. The leather against her cheek had been wet; she let go of him long enough to open the closet door and get a hanger. He shrugged out of his jacket, and let her take it.

She hesitated. "Are you... staying?" Before he could answer, she rephrased: "You _are_ staying, right?"

"... yes." He was a little hoarse. "Yes."

She cleared her throat. "Let me show you where you can... put your stuff."

She started for the stairs, but his hand on her wrist stopped her. She turned back on the first step. He kissed her again, and she discovered what a difference four inches could make.

His hands, at first anchoring her by her hips, slid leisurely up to cup her neck again, then to twine through her hair. She leaned into him, arms around his shoulders, and reveled in the slow slide of his lips against hers, the gentle pressure of his fingers in her hair, the shocking warmth of him pressed along her body. She relished the shakiness of his breath, the way his fingers reflexively flexed against her scalp, the smell and taste of him. She rejoiced in the utter rightness of it. This truly felt like coming home.

Finally, he pulled back and studied her, looking stunned and pleased all at once.

"Lucy, I missed you," he whispered.

That, of all things, was what made her put her arms around him and hold him close, too close, even, for another kiss. It was a good five minutes before she showed him the bedroom. The guest bedroom, not hers. They had time, now, to figure out what they were, and while this was a truly excellent start, he, _this_ , was too precious to endanger by rushing.

"There's, uh... stew," she managed, watching him from the doorway. "And bread. For supper. Are you— hungry? Does that sound good?"

His ran his tongue over his lip. "Very."

She would've expected that having him here would be the most jarring thing of all. But it was the opposite. They'd been side-by-side for so long that him being with her in one more place felt natural.

They ended up on the couch, after supper, with him gently stroking her head in his lap. She took his other hand, and made a discovery. "You..."

"It's upstairs. With, uh... the rest of the things I have left... those are what I went to get."

She brought his hand to her mouth, and kissed his knuckles.

She wanted to sit up and kiss him again. But she was also content, so very content, to lie here like this. "It's all felt strange," she admitted.

"Yes."

It felt like— an ending. This felt like a beginning, but for him it must feel like an ending, too. Of several things. She looked up at him. "It doesn't bother you, that you'll probably never see the Lucy who gave you the journal again?"

Or would he? When they returned from the Hindenburg, Lucy had unceremoniously replaced one version of herself. Would she herself be suddenly replaced, in five or however many years, by a grim warrior?

He looked confused. "Lucy, I love _you_."

She sat up and stared at him. He looked back, not sure what was going on, but not alarmed.

It wasn't news to her that he loved her. But the way he said it... she heard, _you're enough_.

It felt like ropes that had bound her for years were suddenly cut. She straddled his lap and kissed the hell out of him.

He reacted enthusiastically, as if he didn't know what he'd done to get a lapful of passionate Lucy but he really wanted this to become a regular occurrence. His hands tightened on her hips, his thumbs stroking hot arcs near her waist. She leaned into him and licked into his mouth, swallowing his, their, soft noises of pleasure.

Finally she sat back and stared at him, aware that her mouth was swollen, her hair was a wreck, and...

She lay down again, and tugged him down beside her. He curled himself around her as if powerless to resist her gravity.

"I don't know how long I'm staying here," she said. "Or where I'd go. But..." It was easier to kiss him again than to say something like this out loud.

He hesitated. "I have no... plans. For the future," he admitted. "I, uh. Didn't expect to need them."

"I was..." She swallowed. "Maybe we could make some plans together."

He stared at her. "Yes," he said finally. His voice came out hoarse again. "I'd like that... a lot."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One chapter and an epilogue left.
> 
> No spoilers in the comments, please! I don't know when I'll be able to see the two new eps.


	12. Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: on-screen homophobia; references to suicidal ideation
> 
>  
> 
> **Also, no finale spoilers in the comments.**

Lucy could very quickly get used to the feel of Garcia's hand stroking her hair. She shifted a little closer to him, his very presence feeling like a balm.

She tried to figure out what to say, after her proposal for... for their future. Finally she decided she didn't have to say anything. He was here, and they were here together. That was enough.

"Is it hard for you to believe it's over?" she murmured.

He considered. "No. But it's hard to, uh... understand that it's over and I survived it."

She reached up and traced the deep lines of his face, this strained and broken man who'd thrown all of himself into the fight against Rittenhouse.

"Much less," he added, "that..." He studied her. "After the end," he said carefully. "I'm... here. With you."

She could've taken that as a commonplace statement about them finally, _finally_ getting it together enough to turn their relationship into one openly romantic. But she heard much more than that.

 _No,_ she thought, taking her own turn smoothing his hair back from his face. _You're not alone. You're not left with nothing_.

... _we'll figure out the rest together._

"My mother's funeral is Saturday," she said after a few minutes. Mom's body had apparently been sitting in the morgue since Emma and company had dumped it in the present day as a warning. "And... Cahill's is Sunday."

"Do you want company?"

She hesitated. "Please."

It occurred to her to wonder if he'd even gotten to attend Lorena and Iris's funerals. Probably... not.

She swallowed. "There's something I should... I'm surprised Emma never threw it back in your face."

"Mmm?"

She paused to remember that Emma was dead, and that nightmare was over. Then: "When they captured me," she said quietly, "I told them whatever they wanted to hear so they'd let me near the Mothership. They..." She swallowed. "They congratulated me for manipulating you to let me close enough to have you captured. And I said, yes, that's what I did."

He exhaled. "I'm not in a position to blame anyone else for what they did, or said, to take down Rittenhouse," he said after a minute.

She looked up at him. "You know it's not true," she said quietly.

He glanced down at the two of them stretched out together, and unexpectedly, the shadows at the corners of his mouth deepened. "Yes, Lucy, I do."

Eventually she could no longer hide her yawns. And he probably didn't want to sleep down here, considering he was longer than the couch.

She leaned up and kissed him. "I'm going to bed," she told him. Another slow, gentle kiss. "I'll see you in the morning?"

She had seen him nearly every morning for, what, ten months? But this was different. Wonderfully so.

He smoothed her hair back and gave her another Good Witch of the North kiss, like the morning he'd left the base. That wasn't a gesture she would've ever expected from him, but it was incredibly tender. "Yes."

Then he stood and offered her his hand, and she let him pull her up.

"If you need me, I'll be down here."

He looked surprised. "You didn't give me your bed."

She shook her head. "It's... easier to sleep if I pretend it's just a series of naps."

He looked at her for a moment. "Would company help?" he asked carefully. "Or does that not matter?"

She didn't know. "I'm... willing to try it if you are?"

He nodded.

She took his hand and led him up the stairs. When she was done with her turn in the bathroom, he was sitting on the end of what was now his bed.

He gestured politely, if awkwardly. Feeling self-conscious, she climbed under the covers, slid toward the middle, and then stopped. He followed suit.

An awkward silence, and an awkward space.

They'd shared a bed many times before, but always when tight quarters had taken out of their hands the question of _how close do we want to be?_

He cleared his throat. "What do you, uh, want?"

It slipped out: "I want a _lot_." It came out a lot huskier than—

He rolled onto his side, reached for her, and kissed her hard.

Lucy groaned, even as his hands and mouth gentled. She wasn't sure she _wanted_ gentle—

Oh. This slow, thorough, sinful slide of lips and tongue, she _definitely_ wanted this. She arched against him, and the feel of his muscular body against hers made her breathe in sharply. _Oh_.

His shirt had ridden up. Her hand found the exposed strip of skin at his waist, warm and firm— she slid her hand to the small of his back—

He pulled gently away, breathing roughly.

This was far from the first time he'd stirred her blood like this. But it was the first time she wasn't determined to ignore it. Not to act on it, either, not _quite_ yet... but maybe, maybe a lot sooner than she'd— depending on what he—

"Do you— still want me to sleep here?" she managed.

He looked incredulous. Then he made that face that meant he was trying not to smile. "As long as that's what you want."

"I was actually thinking of sleep when you said company..."

"So was I," he assured her. He reached for her again, and kissed her, just hot and lingering enough to make her flush all over again. Then he pulled away just far enough to murmur against her mouth, "Good night, Lucy."

... God help her, he was looking at her like she was a miracle.

She didn't know _what_ to do with that. So she kissed him one more time, then settled against his side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and back and let her rest his head against his shoulder. If that wasn't immediately the most restful position, it was, once she calmed down a bit, a very comfortable one.

"No. No, please, no— don't— no—"

"Lucy. Lucy!" Garcia tried to explain even as his blood ran out— but there was no excuse— they had so little time left—

"No— _please_ , no, why—"

" _Lucy!_ "

She snapped awake, heart pounding. Above her was the ceiling, not the bright sky of her dreams.

Garcia was propped on one elbow above her. She grabbed his face, then slid her hand to his chest. "Don't," she begged. His heartbeat felt reassuringly strong and steady. "Please, don't—"

"Don't _what?_ "

"Take a bullet for me."

He went still. Then he put his hand over the one of hers that was over his heart, and very gently eased down beside her. He held her as she shook— a few tears, but mostly just a violent trembling.

"I don't know why he did it," she managed after a while. "I don't know why either of them did it. I don't know what to think. But I— I can't stand it if— Garcia, tell me you wouldn't."

His sigh chilled her. "You're asking a hard thing, Lucy," he muttered against her hair. "Not sure that's a two am kind of conversation. But I think—" A long pause. "I think it's really over."

" _Please_."

"Lucy, would _you_ promise me that if I asked?" He sounded incredulous. "I won't make you a promise I can't keep."

She turned away in acute misery, caught between the twin grindstones of her willingness to suffer for him and her unwillingness to let him do the same for her. Suddenly things seemed impossibly bleak. "I'm going to sleep on the couch."

He sat up. "Lucy—"

She shook her head. "It's all right. I'm not— I just need this."

She stretched out downstairs, dozed fitfully for a while, and fell into a deeper sleep, only to wake at some noise from the street. Adrenaline rushed through her— no, it had just been a car door. Assassins would be quieter.

She tossed and turned, then sighed and went upstairs. She hesitated just inside the doorway.

"You think I'm gonna bite?" he muttered sleepily after a moment or two.

She climbed into bed, paused again, and then slid to his side. She curled up like before, facing him, her head resting on his shoulder. He pulled away just far enough to free his arm and wrap it around her.

Some hint of how fragile she felt must have shown on her face, or maybe it was just obvious, because he asked, "Is this good, or do you want me to hold you?"

His matter-of-fact tone made her eyes prickle with sheer relief, though what he offered wasn't what she needed now. "This is good." She tucked one of her hands between them.

His arm tightened around her. She fell asleep and this time didn't dream.

She woke alone, but the smell of coffee made it clear where he'd gone. She wrapped her robe around herself and went downstairs.

The way he lit up when he saw her, just like that morning in his room, almost made her stumble. To recover, she focused on the mug he'd just handed her. Hot— very hot. He must've kept it on warm and poured it when he heard her coming downstairs.

"Toast?" he offered. "I got into your pantry, I hope you don't mind."

"Of course not. To minding." She took a sip to help with the brain fog. "... please."

As she spread peanut butter on her slices, she considered. "Garcia..."

He watched her patiently.

"I'm not— I don't—" Crap, now she had to say it or he'd think she was trying to say something else. "I don't know if I'm all right," she blurted. "I think I— will be. Maybe all I need is time. But right now— Garcia, I didn't invite you so you'd look after me."

He regarded her thoughtfully. "Someone gave me great advice not too long ago about how partnerships aren't just when you're strong," he said. "If only I could remember who it was."

She gave him a look, and got an unrepentant smirk in return. Then he turned serious. "I know what it's like to come home from war, Lucy," he told her. "Not a war like _this_ , but— whatever little I can do to help, I don't mind at all. The opposite, actually."

She drank and chewed. Then, quietly: "I don't want us— um, making, um, future plans, to get mixed up with— recovery."

He was still watching her with that complete lack of judgement that was so refreshing. "We're not blank slates, Lucy," he pointed out. "We could wait the rest of our lives and never be over it. At some point, you have to... accept that you are who you are, who life has made you, and start there." His expression had turned dark.

She considered this as he made more toast.

He slid one slice onto her plate and took the other for himself. "Lucy, when you moved in with me..." He touched his tongue to his lip. "I want you to tell me if you ever want me to go."

"You could be waiting a while for that. Like forever."

He choked on his coffee and coughed several times, face going red. "That was, uh... good choking," he clarified when he could talk again, and flushed even redder.

"Oh, good." She felt her own face heat.

They stared at each other across the kitchen island.

She put down her mug, got up, stepped in front of him, plucked his mug from his hand, and set it on the counter. Then she cupped his face in both hands and kissed him slowly.

Finally she pulled back just far enough to whisper, "I'm so glad you're here." She stroked her thumb across his cheek. "Stay."

#

Later, she went out to help Tom navigate a job application. She took him out for coffee afterwards, because he seemed dispirited.

They sat in Starbucks. He stared out the window. "So many people," he muttered.

Lucy sipped her tea. "Must be pretty overwhelming."

He hesitated, gave her a shamefaced look, and nodded. After a few minutes, he added, "And they seem so cold to each other. Like they don't know or care about one another."

"They probably don't."

He looked startled.

"People generally really care about, what, a hundred, two hundred people? Which in your time is about the size of a farming community. But now, it's many fewer people than you interact with in the course of your life. So, yes, most of these people _are_ complete strangers to each other. They may never see each other again."

He shook his head slowly. "Seems like a lonely life."

"It can be," she admitted. Yes, it could be very lonely.

"I mean, Emma told us enough about, you know, she called it civil rights—"

Lucy nodded.

"— that we could get by in the present, and the one guy who tried to disrespect her on account of her being a lady, she shot herself. Don't get me wrong, those mostly sound like good things. But... it seems like you've lost things, too."

"We have," Lucy said. "It's not contradictory to believe that the trend of human history is toward progress, but also to believe that not every step has been the right one." She took a sip. "But, you know, those close-knit communities that you remember, probably someone was on the outside. And these days, outsiders have a better chance of finding their own people."

He nodded slowly. They watched the window a while longer. When two men wandered by hand-in-hand, he winced. "Still struggling with that one."

It was Lucy's job to be the person he came to with comments like that, not to shame him into bottling them up so deep they couldn't talk through them. "Do you know why?"

"It just... doesn't feel natural. _Right._ Why would a man want a man when he could want a woman?"

"How do you feel when you look at an attractive woman, Tom?"

He flushed under his tan. "Not fit for your ears, ma'am."

She resisted rolling her eyes. "Well, the way you feel when you look at a woman, some men feel when they look at a man. Or both." They wouldn't get into "not everyone is a man or a woman" right now.

"But— I mean— that's not the way it's meant to work. Is it?"

"You don't have to understand to be accepting," she pointed out. "Lots of people do things that wouldn't make me happy, but they do make them happy."

"True," he admitted. "Life's not long enough to fuss overmuch in your neighbor's business."

"Exactly."

He seemed to straighten. "I don't mean to complain. I made my choice, and it's not my way to grumble about finding a place strange."

"Well, when you do find it strange, that's what I'm here for."

They talked a little while longer. Then Lucy made sure he knew where he was going before he left. When she got back to the house, something smelled amazing.

She walked through to the kitchen area and found Garcia stretched out on the couch, his head against one headrest and his ankles on the other, absorbed in a book. He looked up and smiled at her.

"What's in the oven?"

"Chicken."

"... we didn't have any chicken."

"I do know how to read a bus map."

Lucy put her bag down, shrugged out of her coat, and draped it over a kitchen chair, shaking her head in disbelief. She sat down on the edge of the couch, near the middle. She cupped his face in her hand, at a temporary loss for words. His smile this time was small, but still warmed her to her core.

"Garcia, I didn't invite you so you'd feel obligated to look after me," she reminded him quietly.

He reached up and took her hand in his, stroking his thumb across the inside of her wrist. "I know. And I know you can look after yourself. But you don't think I get anything out of this?"

She shook her head, unable to think what— she knew that he enjoyed her company, of course. But what might he get out of, specifically, looking after her?

She looked down at him where he lay, relaxed, in sock feet, on her mother's couch. Her couch now, technically.

"My life's been war for so long," he said quietly. "To do this for you, Lucy, it's, uh..." He licked his top lip. "It helps," he finished finally. "If it doesn't, uh, gall you too badly to _let_ me help."

She swallowed. She reached down and unzipped her boots, sliding them off. Then she stretched out beside him. He took the hint and shifted over so she wasn't quite on the edge. She tucked herself up against his side. "I'm cleaning up," she told him.

He smirked. "That was the plan, yes."

After dinner— which was delicious— she called Rufus, but he didn't pick up. She tried Wyatt. He didn't answer either, but she got a text a few minutes later: _have Grace. okay?_

 _Yes, fine_ , she reassured him. Then she stretched out on the couch, which was currently absent of Garcia. She'd seen Rufus and Wyatt both, just a few days ago, and talked to them since then. And yet...

In the quiet uncertainty of homecoming, as they all tried to start their lives over, it was far too easy for unease to creep in. Maybe their friendship, strong as it had been, had been— for the war. Maybe now that that was over...

She got a new text: _id call but shes cried for 17 mins straight and i actually like you._

Lucy snorted. And her unreasonable fear, that now that the war was over she wouldn't— they wouldn't— well, that fear submerged a little deeper.

Mom's funeral was the next day.

In the morning, Garcia borrowed the car for a few hours, and returned with a suit, sober and funereal. It fit him well enough that it had to be his. But where he'd gotten it wasn't, just then, her top concern.

She parked in the small lot behind the church she remembered so well from childhood, turned off the engine, and had to sit for a moment, remembering how to breathe. She'd gotten the last spot in the lot, and both sides of the street were already filling up with cars. It would be a well-attended funeral.

She turned to Garcia. "Thank you," she told him quietly.

He nodded once. She knew, without either of them having to say anything, that he would've been here even if they'd never kissed and never decided to make— future plans— together. Maybe that was almost as comforting as his actual presence.

He waited patiently beside her when she stopped in the middle of the parking lot. "I don't know what's worse," she said finally. "Thinking that none of them know who Mom really was, or thinking it's more likely that, actually, some of them _did_."

"It's not the same," he said after a minute, "but if it helps, I felt the same at... my father's funeral."

She looked up at him. Had she ever heard him mention his father except for the time she'd brought it up first? She didn't think so.

She made herself take another step, then another, then another, and it was easier after that to keep going.

Wyatt and Rufus were waiting on the church steps.

The two of them standing there in their own somber suits, looking like they felt out of place— Rufus had his hands in his pockets— made tears rise in her eyes.

"What, you didn't think we'd make you come to this alone, did you?" Wyatt gave her a lopsided grin.

She threw her arms around him and hung on tight. "Thank you," she whispered, still clinging to him.

"Didn't know he was back in town," Rufus added, when Lucy turned to greet him the same way.

"No, thank you," Lucy whispered. "Thank you." Reluctantly, she let go of Rufus.

Wyatt fished out a handkerchief. "You really did think we'd make you come to this alone."

She wiped her eyes, and sniffled. "I, um..." She cleared her throat, and tucked the handkerchief away to be washed and returned. "Let's go inside before— before." She glanced at the two of them. "You realize this is a church service, right?"

"If you can manage to _be_ here," Rufus said, "I can manage to keep my mouth shut about higher powers for an hour."

She looked at Wyatt.

"Hey, he's the atheist, I'm just, you know..."

"Agnostic," Lucy supplied.

"Yeah, that."

Inside, there was a pew reserved for family, but Lucy refused to sit up front under the eyes of the whole congregation. They ended up halfway back. Rufus filed in first, and Lucy sat with Wyatt on her left and Garcia on her right.

Lucy flipped through the service booklet. Who'd written all this about Mom? Normally it was the family's job. Had— oh God. Had it been someone from Rittenhouse, somehow?

This felt farcical.

The service began. She felt numb, at the same time that she wanted to run screaming into the street. Oh, God. When would this horror show be _over?_

How did you mourn someone when you didn't even know when you'd lost them? If you didn't— if you didn't know if they'd ever even—

Garcia put his hand at the small of her back. She closed her eyes, and breathed out slowly. If she'd had to do this alone, she might've frozen into a one-woman icicle and never thawed out.

As the minister gave his homily, her hand progressively curled into a fist. Wyatt reached down and took her hand. She squeezed hard. The two men didn't let go of her for the rest of the service.

Finally, it was over. Then Lucy had to get through rounds of condolences. Some were from people she barely remembered, or didn't know at all in this timeline. Others were more familiar. She wasn't sure which were worse.

"Lucy!" It was Michael, her old department chair. "Thank God you're all right. When you disappeared right after the explosion at Mason Industries, and then your mother turned up dead, we all feared the worst." He held out his hand. "Lucy, I'm so sorry."

"Thank you," she forced through numb lips.

"She was a tremendous scholar. Truly one of a kind."

"Mmm." She tried to make it sound like a noise of gratified agreement. She probably didn't succeed.

"Homeland Security has given me to understand that your assistance to them is over," he added. "Perhaps we could meet this week to discuss your future plans."

Lucy was too exhausted to try to figure out what that meant. "Sure. I'll... I'll email you." She really just wanted him to go away. Mercifully, he did.

Next were several other colleagues from the department. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, your mother was wonderful, how are you holding up? let us know if there's anything we can do." They seemed like a Greek chorus. She felt like a robot saying "thank you."

One of the associate professors that Lucy didn't really know, Susanna Thomson, glanced past her to Garcia, and did a double take. Wait— for the woman to _recognize_ Garcia—

Susanna reached into her purse, but Wyatt had his gun out first. " _Don't—_ "

Garcia reached for Lucy to move her behind him— she dug in her heels—

— but Dr. Thomson didn't put up a fight.

Thank God the church was nearly empty by now. Lucy, having spent days feeling out of place in a non-war setting, fiercely resented the war intruding back into her life. But Denise's team reached them so quickly, after Rufus called, that Lucy almost wondered if she'd been waiting for trouble. Lucy didn't ask. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

Finally Homeland Security carted Dr. Thomson off. They all vacated the church, getting a few last scandalized looks from the minister. Wyatt scanned the street, his hand in his jacket, but no one attacked them.

"So, uh, what now?" Rufus asked.

"Now?" Wyatt said. "We find a bar, and let Lucy get however drunk she wants to be."

That sounded _amazing_.

The bartender came over after their third round, to not-so-subtly check on these three men who were pretty clearly getting a woman drunk. "It was my mom's funeral," Lucy explained. Honestly, she felt a _lot_ better. This had been a great idea. Wyatt was so smart. "These're my friends. They look after me."

"Mmm," the bartender said. "Okay. My condolences."

She lost track somewhere around...

She didn't know. But she also didn't have to feel, and that was merciful.

"So is this... is this a Logan-style wake?" she managed, trying to enunciate. She got it out on the first try, too. Or maybe the second.

Wyatt shrugged, and didn't answer.

Rufus looked between the three of them. "Wait, am I'm the only one who's never gone to a complicated parental funeral?"

She and Wyatt found something very interesting at the bottom of their glasses. Garcia gave Rufus a cold look.

"What did happen to your dad, Rufus?" she asked. It was probably a stupidly blunt question and it wasn't any of her business, but her team had seen her trauma for months. There wasn't really anything they didn't know about her. And...

Her train of thought derailed.

Rufus swirled his own glass. "Mine walked out," he said evenly. "My stepdad, Kevin's biological father, he died."

"I'm sorry." Lucy leaned over and gave him a hug.

She cut herself off somewhere after her... She wasn't sure. She left some money on the table to cover her tab, waving off the others when they tried to pay her share. She slid out of the booth after Garcia. He caught her when she nearly swayed off her feet. He tried to guide her to the door, but she turned towards the bathroom. She was absolutely not getting in a car without peeing first.

"Need a ride, Lucy?" Rufus asked when she came out.

She tilted her head towards Garcia. "He'll get me home. Going there anyway."

Wyatt looked like he'd bitten into something unpleasant.

Lucy felt for her keys, intending to give them to Garcia. But he held them up. When had that happened?

She swayed. Garcia steadied her again. Then they'd reached the car. She didn't quite remember walking all this way. She also didn't remember when it had gotten dark.

Wyatt looked at Garcia. "You'll look after her? Make sure she gets to _sleep_?" There was a bite to his words she didn't quite...

Oh.

"Garcia doesn't need to get me drunk to get in my pants," she assured Wyatt. "'specially not in that suit."

Wyatt looked extremely unamused. Rufus looked quietly horrified. Garcia was biting back a smile. "Yes," he told Wyatt. "I'll look after her."

"Good." Was Lucy just imagining it or was Wyatt's tone really threatening?

The car ride made her feel sick. She closed her eyes. When they got home, he came around to help her out of the car. She stumbled into his side when they started walking.

He stopped. "If I pick you up, are you gonna throw up?"

She shook her head.

So he carried her into the house, up the stairs, and into her own bedroom. "Don't have to do that," she muttered, as he got some pajamas out of her drawer.

"True and totally irrelevant. Can you dress yourself?"

"Hafta pee." She stumbled into the bathroom with the pajamas.

The world lurched strangely, but she managed to use the toilet and get her pajamas on without falling into anything. Much. When she made it back to her bedroom, Garcia handed her two pills and held out a water glass.

"Preemptive painkillers. You'll feel better in the morning for them."

She swallowed, and toppled over into bed. He tugged the top sheet up over her and turned off the lamp.

When he turned towards the door, she grabbed his wrist. "Don't go."

He looked down at her. "Lucy, you're _very_ drunk."

"I know but I don't want to be alone. Don't make me be alone." Words were escaping that she normally wouldn't...

Another thought train, gone.

He hesitated, then got into bed with her. He'd changed, while she was in the bathroom, but he wasn't wearing pajamas. She scooted towards him and buried her face against his chest. Yes. Good.

It struck her as deeply, fundamentally _right_ that he should be here with her, stretched out beside her in her bedroom, in her bed. "You belong here," she muttered against his shirt.

He draped his arm loosely over her waist. "Here?"

"With me," she slurred. "'nd 'm glad. I'm glad..."

#

She woke to a bad headache and an ominous sense of embarrassment.

It was definitely day, judging by the irritating sunlight. She rolled over and flopped face-first into her pillow until it went away.

When she woke again, her head felt a little better, but she definitely had to get up. Her robe was draped across the foot of the bed. Hadn't she left that in the bathroom?

Her funeral clothes were gone from the bathroom, too. She'd have to find them— because, oh God, she had to do it all over again this afternoon.

But she'd barely known Cahill. This funeral would be an entirely different trainwreck than Mom's.

... Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse had been at Mom's funeral. Dr. Thomson. Oh God.

She brushed the scuzzy taste out of her mouth and went downstairs. Garcia looked up from where he was working on a laptop at the kitchen island. He'd put a mug of coffee at the seat around the corner from him, with a bottle of aspirin. The coffee was still steaming. Garcia Flynn, coffee ninja. This she had not expected.

"Your head?" he asked— quietly, bless him.

"Mmm." She sank down on the stool, took the pills, and waited for them and the coffee to work their magic. She watched him work. It was crazy how fast she'd gotten used to having him here. He felt like he belonged. She really, really wanted him to stay.

She thought about him staying.

"Are we going to need a condom?" she blurted.

He stopped typing and gave her an incredulous look. "No offense, Lucy, but I prefer my partners a little less—"

The bottom seemed to fall out of her stomach. "Oh," she said. "Of course. That's not— I mean, I wasn't expecting that when I asked you to come here— I just, maybe I— I thought, but it's fine—"

He watched her with growing confusion, until the frown smoothed out of his eyebrows. "—nauseated," he finished, loudly enough to be heard over her.

She stared at him. Blinked. "... what?"

"What exactly did you think I was going to say?" he added.

Oh. So he hadn't meant— _oh_. "I, um..." She cleared her throat. "I thought you were saying no."

"... I thought you were saying _now_."

"Oh, God, no," she replied reflexively. "No offense, but—"

His eyes crinkled. "Don't worry, Lucy. A hangover isn't my idea of foreplay either."

So... what _was_...?

She felt warm all over. The silence in the kitchen was suddenly very loud. He was still watching her.

He cleared his throat. "You're asking if I'm clean?"

"Yes." She felt the warmth in her face mirror the faint pink in his own. "It's... an awkward conversation, and I already feel about as unsexy as possible, so I thought we might as well get it out of the way—"

"Right. Ah. I tested all negative before Lorena and I, ah, became intimate, and I was faithful to her. Uh, although..." Something seemed to occur to him suddenly. He licked his top lip. "Considering the prevalence of bodily fluids in my line of work, I could, uh, stand to get checked again. For hep C if nothing else."

"Mmm. Okay." It suddenly occurred to _her_ that she and Wyatt hadn't— he _never_ in a million years would've slept with her without telling her if he had something, but men were often asymptomatic. "I'll, uh. Also. Yep."

Her face burned. If the results showed something—

Oh, God. Well. She'd survived war and horror and things she'd never expected. If she had to, she could tell her ex-lover and current good friend that he'd given her something.

"Do we need them for contraception?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I have an implant. The lighter periods were a bonus when we were in the past. You would not believe some of the unsanitary... well." It wasn't like she could've reasonably expected menstrual hygiene to be more advanced than general hygiene.

But still.

"I mean, poor nutrition and, you know, primitive contraception meant women started later and had fewer periods and probably lighter ones, so it wasn't as big of a deal," she added. "But still. Naproxen and menstrual cups are high up the list of my favorite modern day conveniences."

"Ah." They were both quiet for a moment. Then, inexplicably, he looked sad.

"Garcia?" she prompted gently.

He looked up, his mind coming back from wherever it had gone. "I, uh..." He hesitated. She thought he was going to tell her it was nothing. "The conversation reminded me." He paused. "Most birth control she tried made Lorena sick, so we generally used condoms, but, uh. We'd..." He hesitated again. "I'd talked about a vasectomy after another child or two."

Lucy stared at him for a moment. Then she got up and stood behind him. She hesitated, feeling, in a strange way, like she didn't want to intrude on his grief. But she cared about him and he was sad— and he had told her.

She put her hands on his shoulders, and gently kissed his hair. He put his hand over one of hers, turned his head, and leaned back against her chest. She rested her head against the top of his. Only when he took a deep, deep breath and straightened up again did she sit back down.

He cleared his throat. "So, test results... first, yes?"

She nodded. "Period sex has never been my favorite anyway."

"Mm? Oh."

"I told that to a guy in college once," she added, "and he said, and I quote, 'don't worry, babe, we can just use a condom,' which, one, that was going to happen anyway, and two, his genitals weren't actually the ones I was worried about."

He didn't say anything, but his eyes crinkled a little.

The details of some of the evening's conversations began to come back to her. Not all of them. She remembered asking Wyatt and Rufus about what they were doing, but she didn't remember the answers. She remembered asking Wyatt for the latest pictures of Grace, and remembered Rufus teasing him that that was all on _that_ memory card, but she didn't remember the pictures themselves.

She did remember saying stupid stuff to Wyatt. And Garcia. And probably Rufus too.

"I hope I, uh, didn't embarrass you too badly last night," she said, feeling warm all over again. "Sorry about that."

He looked confused. "For what?"

"For what I, um, said by the car..."

His frown vanished. "Lucy, it's not _embarrassing_ for you to tell me you find me attractive enough to consider sex with me. Uh... quite the opposite."

"Oh good."

"Now, if you want me to leave the suit _on_ , that we'll have to talk a—"

She buried her face in her hands. "Stop."

When she looked up again, he was smirking.

"So, as long as we're having awkward or outright unpleasant conversations this morning," she said after a minute or two. "You tried to push me behind you in front of that Rittenhouse agent yesterday. Even though she was going after _you._ "

He looked at her.

"Garcia—" She shook her head. Her next words came out as a whisper. "I don't think I can stand anyone else dying for me."

"So you want me to live with you dying, instead?" His voice had turned rough.

... oh.

She propped her head on her hands. "I hadn't thought about it that way," she admitted. For _him_ to—

If there was any justice or mercy in the universe, neither of them would have to make that decision.

"I promise not to, uh, gratuitously sacrifice myself," he added, clearly trying to lighten the mood... in an inimitably Garcia-like fashion.

She stared him down. "Good. Because I know I _can_ live without you, but I sure as hell don't want to have to try."

He looked at her, eyes big.

Feeling self-conscious, she looked down. "I'm. Going to go shower now. Thanks for the... coffee."

"If you feel up to food later—"

"I know my way around my own kitchen, Garcia," she reminded him.

He shrugged, his smile a little abashed.

She hesitated in the doorway, then turned back. "Forgot something. Scoot back."

He looked very confused, but did as she said. She pushed herself up and sat sideways across his lap, slid her hands through his hair, and kissed him.

He groaned softly into her mouth. He rested one hand on her hip and cupped the back of her neck with the other. She leaned even closer. His hands tightened, their heat, through her layers, feeling obscenely good. He tilted his head, turning their kiss slower and deeper.

When she ran her nails lightly across his scalp, his breath hitched. She dragged one hand back to cup his face, to enjoy the feel of his stubble against her palm. It would feel even better under her lips, but she felt absolutely no inclination whatsoever to pull away.

He slid his hand up from her hip oh-so-slowly, letting the pressure and heat of his touch kindle a heady mixture of pleasure and desire in a swath of skin. That deliberate, tantalizing speed left her plenty of time to anticipate— by the time his hand reached her breast, she was— oh, hell, his hands were so damn _big_.

She leaned eagerly into his touch, a soft, needy almost-whine escaping her. When he shifted his hand, dragging his thumb just _there_ , circling— she gasped, bit lightly at his lip— pushed against his hand, wanting more—

Her center of balance shifted suddenly.

Only Garcia's quick reflexes saved her from faceplanting into the kitchen tile. The chair rocked ominously, off-balance as he was. She slid down to the floor before she could get them in any more trouble. She still felt the ghost of his touch, she still _wanted_ — but she couldn't help laughing, either. His eyes closed, and his shoulders shook.

Then he reached out and cupped her cheek. She turned her face into his palm and kissed it, letting her tongue just brush against his skin. His soft gasp—

His eyes were wide. He traced the line of her mouth with his thumb, the same thumb that had just—

She was so, so tempted to say _fuck it_ and, well, yes. But.

"Garcia." Her voice sounded so ragged.

"Mmm."

"We have— I have that funeral in three hours." And something told her that once they started...

"Right. Yes." He inhaled slowly, and dropped his hand, looking like it pained him.

She swallowed. "And much as I'd like to spend all three hours continuing what we just started... I'm going to go shower."

"Shower. Yes."

She'd thought he'd looked wrecked after their first fierce, desperate kiss, but now— _now_ — he could barely manage words.

She felt proud. And turned on. And like she had to get out of here or her resolve would crumble. She fled to the privacy of the shower.

#

Today it was another church on another side of town. This one had steps, too; today just Wyatt was waiting.

"Rufus couldn't face it," he told her. "Said to tell you sorry."

"God, no. If I'd known he was even thinking about it— After what Cahill did to him?" She shook her head. "Trust me, the only reason _I'm_ here is for— closure."

Like yesterday, she sat between Wyatt and Garcia, buoyed by their presences. No one knew her here, and the anonymity was a relief. On the other hand, she had to sit through intolerable minutes of encomiums for one of the Bay Area's best-known pediatric surgeons, a pillar of the community who gave generously to charity, a...

Her nausea returned, and it wasn't the hangover.

Up front was the wide-eyed, dark-haired boy who'd answered the door that one time. Her— her half-brother, right? With the woman who had to be his mother. Maybe he was hers from another marriage and no relation of Lucy's.

... how much did he know? He'd looked so innocent. What, thirteen, fourteen? Wasn't that the age at which Rittenhouse started telling...

And what about his mom? She had to be Rittenhouse. Didn't she? Or—

In Lucy's original timeline, had Mom been like... an emeritus member? Whatever move she'd been intending to make with regard to Lucy, she hadn't made it before she... while she could. Had she intended to indoctrinate Lucy at all? It wasn't as if her decline had been sudden. It had been, actually, agonizingly slow and painful.

Had the plan been for Rittenhouse to go after Lucy after Mom was dead? Or had Mom had some kind of change of heart? If so... how much had Dad had to do with that? Lucy was as sure as she could be that _he_ hadn't been Rittenhouse. If someone as influential as Mom was allowed to marry outside the cult— or maybe it was _because_ she was influential that she'd gotten away with it.

The next time they all sat down, Wyatt stiffened. He nudged Lucy, and pointed to the front of the church.

In front of the very front pew, now visible through a gap between some of the people, a familiar figure sat alone in a wheelchair. Lucy gasped. Painful relief flooded through her. " _How_?" she whispered.

Wyatt shrugged, and shook his head.

Lucy got through the rest of the funeral on auto-pilot. After it ended, she waited impatiently for enough people to leave. Then she squeezed past Wyatt into the side aisle and rushed to the front. "Ethan? Grandfather!" She knelt in front of him to put them at eye level.

"Lucy." Ethan looked so pleased to see her. He reached forward and took her hands.

"Emma— Emma said she killed you," Lucy managed to get out, despite choking up.

Ethan smiled. "Oh, she tried."

... right. Lucy felt dazed. He'd lived as a double agent in Rittenhouse for over sixty years. Of course he'd picked up some tricks.

Wyatt and Garcia, following more slowly, stood a few feet away. She stood up far enough to give Ethan a tight, tight hug. They held each other for a long moment, and some cold place deep inside her warmed a bit.

She straightened up and wiped her eyes. On Wyatt's handkerchief from the day before, actually. "I'm— sorry about your son."

Ethan shook his head. "I am only sorry for the man he could have been," he said slowly. "Of all the things I gave up to do what you asked, he is the one I regret most. Wondering... if I could have made him choose another direction, if I hadn't had my part to play."

"I'm so sorry," she whispered.

Behind her, Wyatt cleared his throat. "It, uh, worked, if that... helps."

"Yes. I know." Ethan looked to Wyatt's side, and frowned. "What is Garcia Flynn doing here?"

"He's with me," Lucy said.

Ethan arched one eyebrow, looking very patrician-like. "Oh, _is_ he?"

Lucy tilted her chin up. "Yes," she said. " _He is_."

They stared at each other.

Finally Ethan admitted, "I suppose I don't have the right to tell you what to do with your life."

Lucy hugged him again. "You have no idea how refreshing it is to hear someone in our family say that."

Ethan snorted.

"Can I— I'd like to see you," she said.

"Yes, of course. I want to get to know you, my dear." He cupped her cheek. "My granddaughter."

"This week?" she suggested.

"Tomorrow, if you like. Lunch?"

Lucy smiled, tearing up all over again. "I'd like that a lot."

Her probably-half-brother and his mom were standing off to the side, looking confused and sad, so Lucy said goodbye to Ethan. She'd save that explanation for another time... or never.

"Well, no one wanted to shoot us this time," she pointed out, walking to the car with Wyatt and Garcia.

Wyatt shook his head. "That's a sadly low bar."

"But I'm glad we cleared it," Garcia said, "considering it was _me_ they wanted to shoot last time."

They reached Lucy's car; Wyatt had parked farther out. Wyatt cleared his throat. "I'm reporting back to Pendleton on Tuesday," he said.

"... oh."

A pause.

"I'll start the car." Garcia somehow had her keys again. He slid behind the wheel and closed the door.

Lucy reached out and hugged Wyatt tightly. "Take care of yourself," she told him. "And don't you dare interpret that as a goodbye."

"I would never," Wyatt assured her, his voice thick and close to her ear.

"Let me know when you find out your assignment. And, you know... anything else." She pulled away. "I want— I _expect_ — to hear from you. Often."

He smirked. "Yes, ma'am."

"Grace is staying with Jessica?"

Wyatt nodded. "Marian— her mom— is coming out to stay with her and Kevin for a while, help look after Grace."

Lucy nodded. "Let her know if she needs anything at all, she can get in touch with me."

"Thanks, Lucy."

Lucy hesitated. "The really stupid stuff I said to all of you yesterday... you didn't take that as, I don't know..."

"As what?"

"As me— flaunting Garcia," she blurted.

Wyatt looked at her like she'd grown a second head. "You're the last person who'd ever do that," he said. "Were you worrying about that all night and all day?"

"Uh, no, all night I was out cold."

"I took it as you being really drunk. That's all." He sighed softly. "Look, I want you to be happy, and... he seems to make you happy." He shrugged. "That's... really all I care about."

Lucy smiled at him. Then: "My lunch is booked up tomorrow, but do you want to have dinner? Before you go?"

He made a self-deprecating noise. "You like screaming? I'll have Grace. Jessica's working."

"Oh."

"How about breakfast? I'm not picking her up until about one."

"Sure. Pick a place and I'll meet you there."

They hugged one more time. Then Wyatt headed for his own car, and Lucy climbed into the passenger seat. Though she'd kept him waiting, Garcia didn't look impatient. "You want me to drive?" she asked.

"Not unless you have a burning desire to."

She shook her head. "Let's go home," she said quietly.

He looked at her, his expression suddenly very warm and soft. "Yes," he agreed. "Yes."

#

There were a million things she could've, should've, been doing. Most of them had to do with finding a job after pretending to be dead for months. So she could, you know, pay the bills. And eat.

Right now her bills were mostly theoretical. She didn't have an apartment. All she had was her cell phone bill, and her savings could cover that for a while. But she and Rufus were living with Angela and Kevin, and there was no money coming in to the household at all. They couldn't live like that for very long.

In theory, she and Rufus wouldn't have too much trouble finding new jobs. Their last reference, Connor, might be in disgrace with the field, and they might've been totally off the grid for nearly a year, but they were still experienced coders in the Bay Area. They'd find _something_.

But Jiya had gone to work for Mason Industries in the first place because she didn't want to be just another cog in the wheel of a company whose main purpose was to make its CEO obscenely wealthy, while producing nothing that mattered. She didn't _want_ to work with a bunch of code bros who only cared about their 401ks and Silicon Valley parties. She wanted what she'd always wanted: to save the world.

The irony didn't escape her.

So she should've been searching for non-profit jobs— those paid dismally, like, seventy thousand dollars a year less than her old job dismal— or following up with an old boss she'd asked to be a reference who hadn't gotten back to her, or checking on that lead Stasia had sent her. Instead, she was lying on the couch, snuggled against Rufus's chest. She regretted nothing.

He slid his arm around her waist and buried his nose in her hair. "Have I ever mentioned how good your hair smells?"

She stifled a giggle. "Once or twice, plus, there was that whole smelling my hairbrush thing."

"I did that _once_. ... that you saw," he muttered under his breath.

"Rufus, _I'm clairvoyant now_. Remember? I see everything."

"Okay, uh, easy there, Big Brother."

She rolled over and rested her head against his chest so she could hear his heartbeat. She never got tired of that sound. "I love you," she whispered.

"I love you, too." He pressed his lips to her hair, then her forehead. "And, okay, you're going to think I'm a sap, but... every morning I wake up, I think, I can't believe I get to spend the rest of my life with her."

Jiya felt her eyes prickle. Only Rufus could possibly think anyone would find that objectionably sappy.

Just for that, she leaned up and kissed him. Then she settled back against his chest.

"Can I ask you something?" he said after a while.

"Mm-hmm."

He hesitated. "Have you been... checking your visions lately?"

She hesitated, too. "Once," she admitted. "Since the last battle." She looked up at him. "Want to know what I saw?"

"... I don't know, do I?"

"You were old and grey," she told him quietly.

It took a moment for that to sink in. "And... were you there?"

"I was."

He buried his face against her hair again. Then he tilted her head back and kissed her, relieved, desperate, needy.

"I've been... scared to look again," she admitted, when they finally came up for air several minutes later. "Because— if I see something—" She swallowed. "I'd have to break in and restore and steal one of the time machines to fix it."

"No," Rufus told her. "Jiya, no. You already gave up three years of your life to save me. Don't— end up in federal prison, too."

"But— I feel like such a coward."

"You're the bravest person I know."

But they weren't mutually exclusive.

"Do you ever wonder what else we could've changed?" she asked after a while. "Maybe _should've_ changed?"

"Yes," he admitted. "Often."

She hesitated. "Do you ever feel guilty that we didn't?"

His turn to pause. "Is it bad if I don't, really?"

She looked up at him. She didn't think it was bad, necessarily, but it wasn't what she'd expected. "Do you know why?"

"Because," he said slowly after a minute, "there's no guarantee we'd... actually make things better?" He gently scratched the back of his neck. "Science is... applying inputs and measuring outputs. There's a sense to it, even if you can't always find it. But history's different. Lucy would be the first to tell us that. We could go back and stop history's great tragedies, only to come back and find the present was unimaginably different." He paused again. "Maybe even find that Rittenhouse was in charge again, since we didn't wipe them out in the past."

She had to admit the possibility of accidentally helping Rittenhouse, by some fluke of history, was a powerful argument against changing anything else.

"I think..." he added. "I think thinking we can fix everything is... arrogant. And dangerous."

"But... we could fix _some_ things."

He nodded.

"But we don't know which is which."

He nodded again. "And... somehow, we have to live with that."

"Hey?" she murmured after a minute.

"Yeah."

"I love your thoughtfulness." It wasn't necessarily the kind of thing she would've said, before. She wasn't a sappy person either. But the three and a half years without him had made it very viscerally clear that holding anything back was foolish.

Most people, after they learned that lesson, never got a second chance. She was determined not to waste hers.

He smiled, a little bashful, a lot adorable.

"Hey, Rufus— oh, sorry." Kevin started to back out of the living room.

Rufus sat halfway up. "No, what is it?"

"I just... was wondering if you wanted to maybe play Dominion, 'cause I thought you weren't doing job stuff. Didn't mean to interrupt you guys."

"I promised Mom I'd help her in the kitchen before dinner," Rufus said. "Maybe after?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Is this... a brothers thing, or is there room for one more?" Jiya asked. She didn't routinely try to join them, but she knew this game, and it was more fun with more people.

"Yeah, that's cool," Kevin said. "Long as you two don't gang up on me."

She looked at Rufus. "Nope, I plan to kick his butt."

Rufus scoffed. "Oh, please."

Jiya smiled.

The first few days after leaving the Nebraska base, Jiya had been too stunned and numb to think much about eating dinner with the Carlins every night. Now, she enjoyed it. Getting to know Angela and Kevin more hadn't changed Jiya's opinion that they were really nice people, and Rufus, well... He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

He was enough, all on his own. But she was marrying into a nice family, and that was just a great bonus.

"So, have the two of you thought any more about what kind of wedding you want?" Angela asked, after a few quiet minutes of plate-passing and chewing.

Jiya and Rufus exchanged looks. "Quiet," Rufus said. "Small. Soon."

They just had to deal with all this pesky finding gainful employment, and readjusting to not being at war, and... you know, little things like that.

"Well, I was talking to Jiya's mom this morning, and—"

Jiya choked on a mouthful of squash.

Rufus was just as flabbergasted. "Wait, wait. How do you even _know_ Jiya's mom?"

"I Skyped with her." Angela looked puzzled.

" _How_ —" Rufus repeated, as Jiya coughed and tried to regain the ability to speak.

"How did you get her Skype ID?" Rufus added.

"Jiya left her laptop open one day."

Rufus gaped at Angela. She smiled serenely.

"No," Rufus said firmly when he'd recovered his wits. "Mom, I love you, but no. Jiya and I are planning our wedding, and we know what we want, and... just, no."

Jiya felt a great swell of affection for him, that nearly distracted her from her watering eyes and raw throat.

"Well, yeah, that's what Mrs. Marri and I thought too," Angela said. "She wants to come over for the wedding, of course—"

" _What_." Jiya's voice came out scratchy.

"— and she was asking if two weeks would be too soon, and—"

What came out of Jiya's mouth was not English. Nor was it Entish, Elvish, or the tongues of Men.

"— and she said she didn't want to ask you because you had so much going on, so I said I would."

"Mom, we want something _small_ ," Rufus repeated. "A, a courthouse ceremony and then all our friends going out to eat afterwards. And then maybe Jiya and I go away for a weekend. Depending on work."

"See? That's planning. That's all I'm asking."

Rufus made a grudging, grumbling noise.

"If you pick a restaurant, I can see about renting out a room—"

"No!" Rufus said.

"That's how it starts," Jiya added. Her voice was still raspy. "First it's renting a room, and the next thing you know I'm marching down the aisle, _an_ aisle, wearing a small ocean of lace, following nineteen bridesmaids in identical horrifying outfits."

Angela looked at her.

"... or, you know, something."

"I did see these adorable—"

"No!" Jiya and Rufus chorused together. Jiya only realized they'd fallen for it when Angela smirked.

"A room would give you more privacy," Angela added. "And you wouldn't have to know in advance exactly how many people were showing up."

Rufus and Jiya exchanged looks again. "We'll think about it," Rufus said. "And let you know. And it's really, really sweet that you want to help, but we're going to plan this. Really."

Angela looked innocent. "I am only offering to help carry out whatever plans the two of you make, honey."

After dinner Kevin and Jiya cleared the table and cleaned up quickly, and then the three of them played Dominion as Angela watched a show in the other room. Kevin ended up kicking both their butts, and did a clumsy and secretly adorable victory dance across the room. "Oh yeah, I beat the nerds, oh yeah..."

"He says," Rufus said, "as if he himself doesn't fall into that exact same category."

Later, when she and Rufus were in bed together, she said, "Hey?"

"Mmm?"

She hesitated. "I was thinking about what you said earlier. About changing things and not knowing if it's for the better."

"Mmm."

Another pause. "If my dad... hadn't died like he did, if my mom hadn't gone home to Beirut... I would've turned out as a completely different person. And maybe not a better one. It... sounds really disloyal to say, but..."

"No. It just sounds like you have a thorough grounding in chaos theory." He leaned against her a little more closely. "Where would you start?"

She turned her head. "Is that rhetorical?"

"No."

She hesitated. "I mean... there's the obvious ones," she said. "End the Trail of Tears. Extend Reconstruction. Fix all the various screwed-up immigration policies. But... would that help? Or..."

"... or would the prejudices that caused the originals just find another outlet."

"Exactly." She hesitated again. "But are we just saying that because we're tired and want it to be over?"

"I mean, we are talking about breaking into a secure government facility, restoring the time machines we so carefully decommissioned, and probably going to prison." He sighed. "When Flynn told me that Lucy wanted to take the Lifeboat to kill David Rittenhouse, he said he'd tried to convince her she didn't owe it to anyone to wipe herself out like that."

"Are you taking life advice from Garcia Flynn?" It was more reflexive than sincere; they all knew the man _could_ be a ruthless disaster, but he hadn't been in a long time.

"In this case... I think he was right."

Slowly, she relaxed against Rufus and drifted towards sleep. "What about climate change?" she muttered after a while.

"Hmm?"

"You know, the imminent collapse of life as we know it?"

"Mmm. Yeah. That." He shifted. "We'd have to find the right pressure point. We can ask Lucy..."

"I haven't talked to her in a while," Jiya said. Wait, she'd seen Lucy less than a week ago at Wyatt's apartment. But after living with her for months, that felt like a while. "I'll call her tomorrow and see if she wants dinner."

Rufus kissed her hair, and they both fell asleep.

#

Garcia heard Lucy's key in the lock, then her footsteps and the closet door opening and closing. She appeared in the kitchen a moment later, looking stunned. But not horrified, so whatever had happened was surprising but not bad. Not by the standards of the war against Rittenhouse, anyway.

Little by little, day by day, that pinched, haunted look was leaving her face. He hoped he'd be around to see it gone entirely. To see her laugh freely, and, though Garcia knew she would never forget— you never forgot— slowly put it behind her.

She came over to the kitchen island and kissed him, then took the seat around the corner from his. He watched her, and waited.

Yesterday had been breakfast with Wyatt and then lunch with her grandfather. She'd come back from the former looking happy, and the latter teary-eyed, but also happy. Today had been the meeting with her former department chair.

"Apparently in this timeline," she said slowly, "Homeland Security arrested two members of the department as part of Rittenhouse."

That was not entirely surprising— nor was it surprising that the journal had said nothing about it. Carol Preston had almost certainly been the one to spread Rittenhouse's influence through the department, and her role had clearly been different in the journal timeline.

"Apparently," Lucy added, "one of them helped tank my tenure case."

Garcia's eyebrows went up.

"And I am trying for the _life_ of me not to wonder if it was that way in our original timeline," she continued, "but— the gist of it is, Michael, the chair, is down two professors on parental leave, which he expected, and two more on medical leave, which he didn't, and he wants me to come back. Immediately. With my tenure case subject to review."

"So you'd, what, be picking up for other professors mid-semester?" Garcia asked, when she didn't continue.

Lucy nodded. "They could just hire more adjuncts, of course. So... he's doing me a favor, in a way. I don't know. Maybe Mom's death— or, he seemed genuinely shook up by discovering a cult had, you know, infiltrated his department."

"I'd have a graduate-level seminar on female peace activists, another on political hagiography— and one of the required undergraduate service courses, survey of twentieth-century American history, which is probably really why he's desperate to get me back." She shook her head. "Three courses is a _lot_ to jump into. I could probably bargain it down to two, but with three I'd build up more goodwill for my tenure case."

Garcia was beginning to see how academia would've played to the worst of Lucy's self-sacrificing impulses. "How immediately does he want you?"

"I promised him an answer by tomorrow. He hinted he'd really like me to take the seminar this Friday if I'm going to do it." She ran her hands through her hair.

"I can't see myself staying at Stanford," she said bluntly, after a minute. "And part of me still can't believe I'm saying that, because I worked at that for so long. But there's too much..." She snorted. "There's too much history here."

"But," she continued, "if I can get tenure here, then if I go somewhere else— I'll come in at the associate professor level. And filling out job apps as an associate professor at Stanford looks a hell of a lot more impressive than as a failed tenure candidate."

She looked up at him. "Were you set on staying in the Bay Area?"

"Ah... no."

She looked relieved. "I can do this if it's just for a month or two. Well. The application season is ending now, which means the earliest I'd be able to apply for another job would be next fall, which would mean it'd be summer or fall of 2019 before I took another position. If I found one. And God knows what they'll stick me with next quarter, since I wasn't around when they made the schedule. But..."

But the very animation in her tone, as she mentally prepared for departmental battle, foreshadowed her decision.

Lucy seemed to notice herself ready to sink back in to the old routines. "Some of it seems so petty," she admitted.

"You just helped save the world. It will." When that didn't seem to reassure her, he added, "Do you still think it's worthwhile for people to learn history?"

She straightened up. " _Of_ _course_."

Garcia smiled.

Lucy relaxed a little. "I guess... I guess I'll call him and tell him I'll do it." She looked at him. "It smells like fresh bread in here."

"Yes. I made some."

"You _what?_ "

"It was that or go out."

She gaped at him.

He leaned over, way over, and pulled the tea towel off the loaf on the counter.

She recovered herself. "I... didn't know you knew how to..."

"You get an outlet for your frustrations, then you get fresh bread. What's not to like?"

His grandmother had taught him that, in fact, so many years ago, when suddenly saddled with an angry young boy to raise.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. "I don't know why I thought you'd stop surprising me when the war ended."

"Me either."

She gave him a Look, then dug in her bag for her phone and stepped into the front room— the library. Sound did tend to echo, here, in this large, open, tiled room.

"Garcia?" she called.

"Yes."

"If I panic and run away instead, will you come with me?"

"Yes."

"Just checking."

He couldn't picture Lucy ever panicking over much again— and he didn't think, this time, he was confusing journal Lucy for real Lucy.

She came back after a few minutes holding a thick stack of books. "Well, I start Friday." She plunked the books on the kitchen island. Two were biographies of Jane Addams, two of JFK, and he couldn't see the rest of the titles.

"Do you want a, uh, sack lunch for your first day?"

She gave him another Look. "What, peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off and a note telling me how proud you are of me?"

"And some stickers for the outside."

That surprised a laugh out of her, which was all he'd been hoping for. "I'd like to see that."

They ended up on the couch together, she flipping through a biography of Jane Addams and making notes, he reading a biography of Hedy Lamarr. Before long, she slid down and put her head in his lap. Obligingly, he dragged his fingers in light circles across her scalp. Garcia had no idea how it could be comfortable for her to write like that, with the notebook propped against her thigh, but she was well on her way to being boneless, so clearly it was.

He didn't pretend it didn't give him ideas, having her practically liquid in his lap. But they were...

Well, he'd gone to a walk-in clinic yesterday, and she'd seen her doctor this morning. Only the HIV tests had been the rapid kind, so they were waiting on the rest of their respective results.

But really, it was more accurate to say they were arriving in their own time.

They weren't teenagers. They were adults, piecing themselves back together after a devastating, shattering war. They were feeling their way back to normal. And... the last person she'd gone to bed with had hurt her badly. The last person Garcia had gone to bed with was dead.

He closed his eyes at the familiar ache. In a very, very weird way, Rittenhouse making the stakes crushingly clear— his family, or the world— had... eased his pain. But... the man he'd been three years ago had had the chance to save _both_ , and had somehow fucked it up. Garcia would always have to live with that. Somehow.

Lucy, without looking up, reached up and put her hand gently along the side of his face. Not distraction. Company.

He closed his eyes, and let that help.

He opened them again a few minutes later, and found he could go on.

So. Yes. He was content to let their physical intimacy progress at its own speed. He didn't want to wait forever, unless there was some pressing reason for them to risk exploding from sexual frustration. But, right now, it was enough to sleep beside her at night and let her lay back against him, to spread his hand between her hip and her ribs, rubbing his thumb in gentle arcs. It was enough to know it was with _him_ that she dropped her barriers— and he knew just how determined Lucy could be in deflecting from her vulnerabilities. It was enough, right now, to see how profoundly she relaxed in his presence. She had trusted him and been deeply vulnerable with him during the war. But she had rarely relaxed, not like...

In fact, she was asleep.

Her book started to slip out of her slack hand. He grabbed it before it hit the floor, but the motion woke her. She blinked up at him, sleepy and rumpled, and gave him such a soft, wide-eyed look that the stirring in his groin at the way she wriggled in his lap was nothing to the overwhelming warmth he felt. Overwhelming like a tsunami, crushing all before it.

Yes. The experience of loving Lucy Preston did often feel like being at the mercy of a force of nature... which was not a bad descriptor for her, either.

"Look at me, slacking off like an undergrad," Lucy muttered. She sat up and rubbed her eyes.

Yes, he could definitely see how academia might've encouraged some of her more self-harmful tendencies.

"I, uh, Jiya called when I was leaving the doctor's office," Lucy added. "I invited her and Rufus over for dinner tomorrow. We'll just get takeout."

"Do you want me to find somewhere else to be?"

"No." She looked at him steadily. "When I invited you here it wasn't with the expectation that you'd absent yourself from my life when it was inconvenient, Garcia."

"I... yes." He hesitated. "But you have a bond with the team, especially Wyatt and Rufus, that I don't. And I'd have to be an idiot to be threatened by that. I... don't always need to be included."

She gave him a look that scared him, a look that said she thought he was something really, really special, and that she didn't realize he was a broken-down killer with little to offer her besides devotion. "But when it's dinner at the home I've invited you to share with me— at our home— you belong here." Her surety suddenly vanished, and she added: "If... if you want to be here."

Garcia was still hung up on _our home._

Her expression turned sad. "Garcia—"

He would've bet money on the fact that she was now thinking she'd been too bold, said something she shouldn't have, assumed she meant too much to him, which was a damned _tragedy_ . He knew it wasn't his job or place to cry over her past, but still, thinking of all the times her generosity and kindness and— and— all the things that made her inimitably _Lucy_ — must've been rejected or thrown back in her face, to prompt this hesitancy—

"No," he blurted. "Yes. I— yes."

"Yes... what?"

"Anything. Everything. Staying for dinner."

Well, at least watching him make a fool out of himself had taken that look off her face.

"Sorry, Lucy, I..." He licked his top lip. "Home," he explained.

He could tell that she understood by the way her eyes got wide and soft and solemn. She watched him with yet another terrifying look, this time the one that meant she saw _exactly_ who he was— and she still—

She leaned in and kissed him lightly. "Stay," she murmured against his lips.

He had already told her he would. He understood why she couldn't fully believe him. In the end, he thought it would just be the fact that he _did_.

But he was also willing to tell her as many times as she wanted to hear it. "I intend to," he whispered, and cupped the back of her head to see what he could do about convincing her.

#

Someone knocked on the door— either Rufus and Jiya, or the food she'd ordered. "Coming!" Lucy called, and dug in her bag for her wallet.

She opened the door— "Wyatt!"

"Uh, hi." He shifted his weight. "I asked Rufus if he wanted to have supper, and he said he was on his way here, so I... thought I'd crash. If that's okay." He held up a six-pack.

Lucy stepped back to let him in. "Yeah, of course, I would've invited you if I knew—"

"I figured."

"I thought you were at Pendleton."

"I... thought I'd be there too."

"What happened?"

He shook his head. "I'll tell you when everyone else is here, okay? Nothing bad."

"Um— um, sure. Here, let's put that in the fridge." She led him towards the kitchen.

"Flynn," Wyatt said behind her.

"Wyatt." Garcia looked up from his book and returned the greeting in the same very, very _civil_ tone.

Lucy suppressed a smile. She thought their remaining dislike of each other, dwindled as it had, was more residual than anything else. But it was _there_ nevertheless, and it meant a lot to her that they'd both come to a place of holding that back for her sake.

Plus it saved her from having to knock their heads together and tell them they were idiots who needed to shape up, so there was that.

The doorbell rang again. Rufus and Jiya and the delivery lady had arrived at the same time. Lucy paid the lady, Rufus and Jiya helped her bring the food in, and in a few minutes they were all settled around the kitchen island.

"So," Jiya began, after some quiet, satisfied chewing. "Lucy, can you think of a single trigger point for our current, you know, the world's going to hell in a hand basket because we can't stop polluting?"

She blinked. "You mean climate change?"

"Yeah."

"A _single_...? We're basically talking about the worst impulses of humanity here, you know, rolled into a perfect storm—"

"That wasn't an idle question," Garcia said.

They all looked at him. Then at Jiya.

"No," Jiya said bluntly. "It wasn't."

"I thought the time machines were decommissioned." Wyatt had stopped eating to stare at Jiya, and his voice had an edge.

"They are," Rufus said.

"So you're gonna, what, break into a secure government facility and—"

"You did," Rufus reminded him.

"Yeah, but would you even get either of them working again before Homeland Security dragged you away?"

Jiya and Rufus exchanged looks. "We'd probably need a distraction," Jiya admitted.

Wyatt opened his mouth.

" _But_ , it's academic if Lucy can't think of a target."

"I mean..." she hesitated. "The last presidential election, obviously, but that would just be a bandaid. In the US, hostility to taking action about climate change is deeply linked to— to political tribalism, to distrust of 'the elite,' to the rise of a very fundamentalist, science-suspicious strain of Christianity that's been happening since the 80s. I mean, it's become an identity marker. And if you _really_ wanted to address the inherent inequity, you'd have to go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution— and then what do you do? You can't condemn everyone to 18  th  -century conditions for the rest of time."

"... oh," Rufus said.

"You'd have to go through and carefully target the political hierarchy in a number of countries across a number of decades, and it would be impossible to predict the side effects if you get your chosen politicians— and I can't believe I even just said that phrase, I feel like Rittenhouse." She shook her head. "You certainly can't fudge the data—"

"Of course we're not gonna fudge the _data_." Rufus looked horrified.

"— because just about every conspiracy theorist on the planet is already focusing on this topic."

"And half of 'em are already convinced they've found something," Wyatt muttered.

"But everyone always says that the time to take serious action was decades ago," Jiya said. "How is this a problem time travel can't solve?"

"Maybe it's not. But you'd have to treat human history as an experiment, making changes until you got your desired effect. And then... what would the world even look like?"

The silence seemed dispirited.

"So, we could," Rufus said after a few minutes, "take plans for a super-efficient solar cell back to the 70s, or something, and see how much farther they get with that to build off of."

"A lot of the materials weren't around then," Jiya pointed out. "I worked in a materials science lab for a semester as an undergrad before I switched to computer science."

"Why don't you solve it in the present?" Garcia asked.

Rufus stared at him, mouth open. "Solve climate change. Me and Jiya."

"Why not? You're both geniuses, and Mason's looking for something new to do, isn't he?"

"It's an entirely different _field_ ," Rufus said. "Well, subfield."

"Harder than inventing time travel? Harder than Jiya inventing the Time Warp?"

Rufus looked over at Jiya with a soft expression. "That was pretty amazing."

Jiya smiled back at him, and Lucy suddenly felt like an intruder.

"Flynn has a point," Wyatt said after a minute. "Don't— torpedo your lives just yet, huh? And..." He winced. "And you'll need help."

"Wyatt, you have a _kid_." Jiya did not look amused.

"Yeah, but—"

"Look, no one's going anywhere, okay?" Rufus said. "We said it was academic if we didn't have a target, and... it sounds like we don't. So. Maybe Flynn really is right."

They were all quiet for a few minutes.

"So, next topic of conversation, our wedding," Rufus said. "We're thinking two or three weeks from now, and we'd, uh, like you all to be there."

"With bells on," Lucy promised.

Rufus looked at Wyatt.

"I..." he hesitated. "I reported to Pendleton and I got my new assignment, and it's... here in the city. So technically I could be called up any time."

"What's the assignment?" Rufus asked.

"Hunting Rittenhouse."

Lucy's involuntary gasp sent a swallow of pho down the wrong way. "We _beat_ them," she managed, when she could talk again. "Wyatt, what—"

"We took away their ability to time travel and we killed most of them," he said. "But there's probably still cells out there, and there's definitely individual agents. Like the one at your mom's funeral. So I've been assigned back to DHS to lead the teams, if and when they get a lead."

"But," Lucy said. Rufus looked similarly upset.

No, it was supposed to be _over_ . And Wyatt certainly wasn't supposed to be fighting them by _himself_.

The look on his face softened. "Look, what we did, only _we_ could've done," he said. "Now they're just a creepy cult stuck in the present, and anyone can hunt them down. But they want someone who knows something about them in charge. Hopefully save some lives that way."

"Okay, call me a sap," Rufus said, "but I don't like the idea of you out there without us to watch your back."

"It's just— it's just regular fighting now, Rufus. That's what I'm good at."

Lucy recovered enough to say, "You sure as hell better be careful. Because otherwise we're busting out the time machine to save you."

Rufus nodded agreement.

"Lucy," Wyatt began.

"No. We got through this war _together_ . We _survived_. Any losses at this point are completely unacceptable. Do you understand?"

After a minute, Wyatt kind of shrugged self-deprecatingly. "Wasn't expecting a dressing-down from a superior officer tonight," he said, trying and failing to smirk. "Look— of course I'm gonna be careful. I want to go home to Grace." He paused. "And, y'know, it's actually a pretty good assignment. Grace'll have to stay with her mom, still, but I'll be able to see her pretty often."

"A pretty good assignment except for the fact that you'll be hunting down people who probably know who you are and already want to kill you," Lucy pointed out.

"I'll be careful," Wyatt promised her, and she had to be content with that.

Maybe. For now.

"So, um, if humanly possible, I will be at your wedding," he added, to Rufus and Jiya.

"Good." Rufus pointed with his fork at Garcia. "You're coming too."

Garcia looked taken aback. "I think I get a say in this."

"You thought wrong. So. Meet at the courthouse, us, my family, Jiya's mom, a few others, and we go to a restaurant afterwards."

"I will start writing my toast," Lucy promised. "In Klingon."

"You don't speak Klingon," Rufus said.

"Don't make me call your bluff."

"Oh God," Wyatt muttered. "Where are you going for your honeymoon?"

"Depends on jobs," Jiya said. "Hopefully we'll both have something by then, and... we won't really have any time off. So we'll probably just go away for the night. Or two nights; maybe we could arrange to leave a few hours early on a Friday if we tell them up front."

"Are you finding anything?" Lucy asked.

"I, uh..." Rufus hesitated. "I'm still looking for something full-time, but I'm actually thinking of taking a job teaching coding in Oakland. They run these weekend workshops, and it's... it's a great group. They sent Connor one of his best engineers, actually." He took a swig of beer. "Pay's crap, of course."

"I have an interview at a B corp next week," Jiya said. "They, uh, work with non-profits to help fix their data management." She made a face. "It'll be a letdown after... time travel. But probably no one will be shooting at me, so that's a plus."

"You looking, Lucy?" Wyatt asked after a minute.

"I actually have a job. Sort of. My old department rehired me because they're desperate for teachers and a formal candidate search wouldn't get them anyone until next fall at the earliest. So... I bust my ass for them for the rest of the quarter, and they re-examine my tenure case."

"Re-examine?" Rufus said. "That's all they would promise you?"

Lucy tilted her head. "Well, apparently in this timeline, one of Mom's Rittenhouse cronies was on my tenure review committee, so hopefully _without_ someone with a vested interest in having me jobless and vulnerable..."

There was a collective wince.

"Of course, they're going to count it against me that I disappeared for over a year," Lucy added. "But I'm going to ask Denise for some kind of official confirmation that I was aiding Homeland Security, or whatever, and hopefully it'll show up so blacked out and classified that they won't ask any questions."

"Congratulations?" Jiya said after a minute. "On the opportunity, I mean."

"Thanks."

Wyatt glanced at Garcia. "What about you?"

"The kind of people to whom my, uh, recent doings would recommend me don't recommend themselves to _me_ ," Garcia said. "And considering I wouldn't touch the NSA with a ten foot stick..." He took a drink. "I'm still looking."

Lucy hadn't even considered this, beyond knowing that he'd been browsing job listings. It was so hard to imagine him doing... anything normal.

Besides... well, the rest of that was a conversation for her and Garcia.

"Call Agent Christopher," Wyatt suggested. "I'm sure she could make you useful."

Lucy gave Wyatt a scorching look before she could stop herself. He looked startled.

"When do you start, Lucy?" Jiya asked after a minute.

"Friday."

"In the middle of the semester?"

"Yep."

Rufus shook his head. "May the Force be with you," he told her solemnly.

Jiya raised her bottle. "Live long and prosper," she added.

That night, in bed with Garcia, Lucy said, "I don't know that I knew you were looking for work."

"I'm not exactly retirement age."

She looked up at him— they still had the lamp by his bed on.

"Did you think I'd move in and just live off of you?" he added after a minute.

"If I thought about it at all, I was thinking... you'd earned a break," she said quietly.

He exhaled slowly.

After another pause, he said, "I find... there's a lot I'm not willing to do any more. So that, uh. Limits things."

"Take whatever time you need," she told him. "I mean it, Garcia. I wasn't— I didn't— I wasn't even thinking of that."

"Is this a transparent ploy to get me to keep cooking for you?"

She appreciated his attempt to lighten the mood, but she still had something on her mind. "I just— I don't like the thought of you going off somewhere, going back to war—" Which was why she'd reacted so strongly to Wyatt's suggestion Garcia contact Denise.

He opened his eyes. "I won't," he promised. "I..."

He was quiet for a long moment. He licked his lip. When he spoke again, she could barely hear him, though they were touching. "I want so badly to be done with war."

She reached up and cupped his face.

"But... I am good at it," he added, tone turning dark. "I've fought most of my life."

"No," she said softly. "No. There are sacrifices we could all make. But... we've all given enough already. You don't owe it to anyone to fight, Garcia. No matter how much good you could do."

Another long exhale. His shoulders dropped, and for a moment, his weariness was almost palpable— as he shed a little of it. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"I learned that from you, you know," she pointed out.

In response, he pressed his lips to her hairline. "Come here?" he whispered.

She happily snuggled against him.

#

She meant to spend all of Thursday prepping for her new classes.

And she started, before Judith called. That took a good hour to sort out. After that, Lucy went looking for an old article Mom had a copy of somewhere. It would be perfect for next week's reading, except Lucy didn't remember the author.

She found the picture as she was going through Mom's desk in the library, trying not to see anything except for what could be the paper in question. But the old, washed-out Polaroid caught her attention. A kid in a hospital bed, flanked by two oddly familiar-looking adults—

It took Lucy a minute. Then she turned the picture over. On the back, in pen: _be brave, sweetpea._

She stared at the black letters.

Then she grabbed her coat and bag before she lost her nerve.

Wyatt had given her Jessica's address in case something went wrong during what he'd assumed would be his deployment. It occurred to Lucy that this might be a bad time— this was _probably_ a bad time— but— she still kept driving. She also had Jessica's number, but didn't know what she would say in a text.

Besides, wasn't _every_ time a bad time for someone with an infant?

Kevin Cody had ended up in Hayward again, not surprisingly. Lucy knocked very quietly at the front door, in case Grace was sleeping. Jessica opened the door with Grace wrapped against her in some kind of sling. "... Lucy," she said blankly. Then: "Wyatt—"

"He's fine as far as I know. That's not why I'm here."

Jessica shrugged, and stood back from the door so Lucy could come in. "Sit down, if you can find a spot."

Lucy stopped just inside the doorway. "I found this in my mom's desk," she said quietly, and held out the picture.

Jessica frowned at her, a little confused, but took it and glanced down...

She seemed to turn to stone. It was a long moment before she turned it over, visibly trepidatious. When she saw the message on the back, her eyes closed. She sank back against the wall.

"... are you all right?" Lucy prompted gently after a long moment. When she got no reply, she said, "Is your brother home?"

Jessica shook her head. "I'm, uh..."

Lucy started to reach for Jessica, stopped, looked around, and didn't find any inspiration. When tears started to appear under Jessica's closed eyelids, Lucy said, "I'm sorry. I just— I thought this belonged to you."

"It does." Jessica opened her eyes and wiped them. "The last time I saw that, your mom showed it to me in the psych ward."

"... oh."

"I was—"

"I know. I... listened to some of your debriefs."

Jessica tried for a wan smile. "Seems like everyone did."

"Well, Garcia was listening in the next room to check what he could on the fly. I..." Lucy swallowed. "I wanted to know," she said bluntly. "Because that was almost... my life."

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment.

" _Was_ it my life, in your timeline?" Lucy added.

"If Carol had told you the truth, I didn't know about it."

Lucy nodded once. "And Wyatt..." She hesitated. "Wyatt sat down and listened to all the recordings, end to end."

Lucy remembered how grim he'd looked, sitting there with headphones on for an entire day. She didn't think she'd ever seen him that furious, before or since.

Jessica sighed softly. "Thanks."

"Of course." Lucy hesitated. "If I... find anything else like that..."

"I want it." Jessica looked pained, but certain.

"Okay." Lucy hesitated again. "How's Grace?"

"Oh, she's good." Jessica looked down at her daughter with a wry smile that was nevertheless warm. "Not letting me get a lot of sleep, and between that and working, it's exhausting, but... I'm just grateful not to be in prison. Or a cult."

Lucy's smile probably looked as painful as it felt.

Jessica hesitated. "Can I ask you something?"

Lucy nodded.

"Did you ever— consider joining Rittenhouse?"

Lucy eyed her. "No."

Those six weeks... that had not been the escape route she'd had in mind, during the longest, darkest, most painful moments. Not that way.

And why was Jessica asking?

_Please don't let it be—_

"So when your mom told you... I mean, you never saw her as..."

Lucy took a deep breath.

"I mean," Jessica continued, visibly floundering, "here was the woman who raised you, and suddenly..."

 _Oh_.

"Suddenly I felt like I didn't know her at all," Lucy finished.

Jessica nodded slowly. "And like everything you knew about your life...?"

"Was a lie?"

Another nod. They stared at each other for a long moment.

Then Jessica looked down. "Don't suppose you have any, uh, advice?"

Lucy snorted before she could stop herself. "No, sorry."

Jessica's smile was as painful as Lucy's breath of laughter had felt.

"At some point," Lucy added quietly, "you just... go on."

Slowly, Jessica nodded.

When neither of them spoke, Lucy looked around the open area. Half of it was a living room, half of it a dining room, and all of it looked too messy for just baby-raising. "Are you in the middle of something?"

"My mom's flying in tomorrow, and I'm trying to shovel out the apartment. Dunno how it got in such bad shape when we've only been here a few weeks, but... Anyway, Kevin said he'd vacuum tonight while I was at work if I could pick up the rest today. So, I've been trying, but..."

"Do you want some help?"

Jessica stared at Lucy. "You're offering to help me clean?"

Lucy really should've been prepping for her classes. But she didn't retract her offer after further consideration.

So she spent about half an hour helping Jessica deal with the main living area and triage the rest. "You still have my number, right?" Lucy asked as she tugged her coat back on.

Jessica nodded, trying to settle Grace, who'd, unsurprisingly, woken up during all the cleaning. Then she hesitated again. "I probably have no right to ask this, but... you and Wyatt..."

"No," Lucy said before she could think about it. "You're right, you have no right. And no."

Jessica studied her. "You can't tell me you weren't in love with him."

That emotional pain made Lucy snappish: "Again, this is none of your business, Jessica."

"No," Jessica agreed, "but it is pretty relevant to the child he and I are raising together, if he's gonna... Look, I'm just... trying to understand. Wyatt's _not_ a bad guy..."

That slightest little hitch in her voice prompted a wealth of emotions in Lucy. "No," she agreed. "He's not. And the woman I was before Rittenhouse took me probably would've been very happy with him. But I'm not her."

Rittenhouse had killed that woman. Or Lucy had killed her to survive. Or sacrificed her for the chance to take down Rittenhouse. Or something.

"Also? No matter what new women Wyatt brings into his life, he's not going to neglect Grace. We both know him better than that."

Lucy left then.

Back at the house, she dove back into her preparations. Tomorrow was the seminar on peace activists, and she was pretty sure she was ready for that. But next week she'd be teaching five days: an hour and a half of political hagiography on Mondays and Wednesdays, an hour and a half of American 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and three hours of peace activists on Friday afternoons. Not an easy schedule. No wonder Michael wanted her to come back so badly.

Plus, she had the lesson plans from all three professors she was filling in for, but she needed to read all the readings, _and_ make sure nothing had changed from the history she remembered. For example, getting Jane Addams's death date wrong.

Garcia returned with two sacks of groceries. "Oh— let me, um, give you money for those," she said.

He put them on the counter and shrugged out of his coat. "Not necessary."

She put her bag down. "Garcia."

He turned to face her. "At some point, we'll sit down and figure this out. Until then, this helps replace what I've eaten."

Sit down and figure this out... the logistics, practical and financial and otherwise, of living together. "If you're sure."

He started unpacking the bags, which she took as an answer.

When he was done with that, he started assembling some supper, and glanced over at where she was sitting at the island. "What's that for?"

"American 2. Next week is _perestroika_ and US influence over the breakup of the Soviet Union."

"And what's the official historian party line on that one?" He sliced up a pepper with an ease that indicated long familiarity with sharp knives.

"Depends on who you ask."

"I'm asking you. Was the US a, uh, shining beacon of democracy across the world?"

Lucy gave him a Look. "What do you think?"

He took his time answering as he worked. Just when she decided he wasn't going to, he said, "I think one of the great underrated miracles of the 20 th  century is how few shots it took."

Lucy tilted her head, watching him.

"You of all people I don't have to tell how unpredictable history is," he added, turning to the sink. "When I was, uhhhh..." He licked his lips. "As the USSR disintegrated, I was... fighting in my homeland. The, ah, toll there..."

Lucy waited quietly.

"— I kept expecting the remains of the USSR to implode violently," he said abruptly. "Like Yugoslavia had. I think... I think I was back from Kosovo before I truly believed it wouldn't. Not on _that_ scale." He glanced at her. "What's the, uh, explanation for why that happened, Professor?"

"You would know better than I," she said quietly. "I'm not going to theorize about something you lived, Garcia."

This sideways glance had an unexpected tinge of— relief. He'd told her, once, that Lorena and Iris had been his second chance. She didn't believe that. But his life with them must've been as different from what had come before than his life now was from either period. Sometimes it was too easy to think _soldier most of his adult life_ and forget the visceral _weight_ of all the wars he'd fought.

"So, uh, what _are_ you going to tell them about US influence in the fall of the USSR?" he asked after a minute.

She tilted her head from side to side. "Obviously there are multiple schools of thought about it, and especially about Reagan's influence. It's one of those issues that kind of becomes a litmus test for your broader political views. In _my_ opinion, containment had a far greater impact, and by the time the late eighties rolled around the USSR was crumbling under its own weight anyway. And in an undergrad class..." She made a wry face. "The standard line is 'while we can't know for sure how things would've turned out differently if...,' which is going to be a little hard to get out this time."

"What, no lab practical component to this history class?"

"That's not funny."

He glanced over again. "No," he admitted. He slid a pile of vegetables into a pan on the stove, and they sizzled softly. "What about the third class?"

"Political hagiography? That should be interesting. Most historians have a soft spot for some historical figure or other, and students especially are still learning to moderate that impulse. And then, some of those figures like Reagan... the extent to which you idolize them is very polarized."

She went over to the refrigerator and lifted a bottle of white wine where he could see it. He nodded, so she got two glasses, uncorked the bottle, and poured for each of them as she talked. "Plus, students are also still learning to think about _how_ history is made. When our perception of a historical figure changes, is it because of new source material, like those two new Edna St. Vincent Millay biographies that had access to her private papers? Is it because of shifting societal mores?" She took a sip. "Would those same biographies have been able to speak so frankly of her affairs with women if they'd been published twenty years ago? Is it both? Or something else?"

He picked up his own glass. "What about the, uh, theory that individual people are largely irrelevant to history, that events are generally determined by the broader trends?"

She stared at him, put her glass down with a _clink_ , and gave him a Look. "Okay. _First_ of all..."

"... for God's sake, leave Churchill _out_ of this, Lucy," he groaned an hour later.

"Why? Because he was unique? You can't say he's too exceptional to be counted _as a strike against the theory that sometimes exceptional individuals matter!_ "

"I didn't say they _weren't_ any, I said _largely_ irrelevant."

"And we've been going in circles for the past hour defining _largely irrelevant_!"

"Lucy—"

She pointed the empty wine bottle at him. "You time traveled back to 1936 to stop Rittenhouse from wiping out a single man who was the first link in the chain that led to the countercultural movement of the '60s."

"Yeah, but we came back from 1780 to find the Treaty of Amiens intact, didn't we? History replaced Cornwallis."

"You do _not_ get to use your assassination of a historical figure as support for your theory."

"Why not? It's history now."

She pointed at him again. "Don't think I haven't noticed you're just playing devil's advocate. I know you don't actually believe this, Garcia."

He smiled sheepishly, as well he should.

She didn't remember cleaning the kitchen after dinner, but the sink was empty and shining, so she must've done it while in the throes of example and counter-example. "And I have to work tomorrow and I'm going to bed," she added.

"I'll be up in a few minutes," he promised.

"As long as you're not looking up more counter-examples to wake me up at three am."

"If I wake you up at three am, Lucy, it won't be to argue," he assured her, mouth mock-solemn.

#

Closing the front door behind her pretty much used up the rest of her energy.

She saw Garcia get up from the couch in the living room— though if he hadn't already known it was her, he would've been up much faster and she wouldn't've seen him coming. "Be right there," she called as she hung up her coat.

She walked through the kitchen and collapsed on the couch beside him.

"It go all right?" he asked.

She reached down and unzipped her boots without looking, then pushed them off. "Yeah, but I forgot how exhausting it is to deal with egos," she admitted. Mostly collegial egos. The professor who'd stopped her just outside her office as she was leaving, and welcomed Lucy back and then gone on for ten minutes about her own new manuscript draft, had been tedious, but mostly harmless. The professor who'd apparently wanted to take over the peace activism class— and God knew _why_ he wanted to add to his own workload like that in the middle of the quarter, with finals not too far off— had been more poisonous.

But then there'd been the students as well, and no one could quite do the combination of huge but fragile ego like a grad student. "Something I said reminded one of the students of her upcoming quals and she broke down crying," Lucy sighed. Unceremoniously, she toppled over and put her head in his lap.

He put down his book— he read _very_ quickly, and the biography of Hedy had been like two books ago. This was, in fact, an account of the Yugoslav Wars. She was very curious what he made of that one, but too tired to ask just now. His fingers slid through her hair, and somehow found that spot right above the nape of her neck where she tended to accumulate tension. Her shoulders relaxed.

"I had to stop class after ten minutes to step into the hall and make sure she was okay," Lucy continued. "And this class has one of those students who _never stops talking_. I forgot how much energy it takes to manage that." She shook her head. "I thought that after the war, anything else would be a cakewalk."

But as the war slowly receded... well, it was true that nothing was nearly as daunting as it had been before. But it still took just as much energy.

 _Slowly_ receded. He had, in fact, woken her at three am, and it hadn't been to argue. It had been from another nightmare so bad he hadn't been able to snap himself out of it. She'd curled around him and held him until he stopped shaking. He hadn't said a word, just stared hollow-eyed at the dresser until he fell asleep again.

"And then another student pretty clearly resented me for not being the original professor, which is ridiculous, because she hasn't been there in a month." She looked up. "I'm sorry. This is petty."

He looked at her blankly. "I asked."

" _And_ ," she added after a minute, "that last lab result came back negative and I'm just too damn _tired_ to do anything about it right now."

They'd both woken for the day in a very different mood than that three am interlude, thank God. In fact, they'd discovered, together, what kind of noises she made with his mouth on her breast. She'd been _kicking_ herself, then, for not picking up some condoms when she'd stopped spotting, because his solid weight against her felt even _better_ when she wasn't trying to ignore how he turned her on. Now they knew they didn't need the condoms, but she didn't have any energy.

That line appeared at the corner of his mouth. "Neither of us are going anywhere," he assured her.

She looked up at him. "Say that again," she whispered.

His amusement vanished into something more profound. He slid his hand out of her hair and rested it against her cheek. "Neither of us are going anywhere, Lucy."

She had to close her eyes or she'd cry. She fumbled blindly until she found his other hand, tugged it closer, and pressed her lips against his callused, war-scarred skin. She didn't think she'd imagined the soft hitch in his breath.

When he finally spoke, after a long, long moment, his voice was rough enough she knew she hadn't imagined that slight catch: "Are you hungry?"

"I'm too tired to know." She should probably eat, though. The class ran from two to five, and then she'd had to deal with a few things in her office, and then she'd run into that colleague, and _then_ she'd had the exhausting rush hour drive home, which meant it was well into normal dinner time.

"I did find your 'sack lunch' during our break," she added. A crustless peanut butter sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, and a note: _knock 'em dead, Lucy_. Both in a brown paper sack sealed with stickers of the first five presidents and somehow snuck into her bag when she wasn't looking. Finding that had been about the only thing that got her through the second half of class.

He smiled, looking justifiably pleased with himself. She reached up and traced his smile lines. He closed his eyes in contentment.

She let go of him and slid her head about two inches to the left, the first step in a protracted campaign of getting up—

He pulled her up to sitting like it was no effort at all— it probably wasn't— stood, and offered her his hands.

After dinner, she resisted his attempts to take over the cleaning and finally pointed out that it took her more energy to fight about it than to actually wash these few things. Then she sat at the kitchen island for about three minutes before she decided to abandon pretense and just go upstairs and go to bed.

"I'm going to read a little while longer," he told her, coming to stand behind her. "I'll try not to, uh, wake you when I come up." He rested his hands on her shoulders. She turned her head so he could kiss her, but he instead pressed his lips to the back of her neck, just below her hairline. He slowly kissed his way down her neck. The faintest hint of teeth— _oh_ — Lucy squirmed, and she certainly wasn't trying to get away from him.

He tugged her neckline down so he could keep going, all the way to the middle of her shoulder blade. Then he straightened up. "Good night, Lucy. Sleep well." His voice vibrated with a hint of laughter.

She slid off the chair, and turned, considering him with narrowed eyes.

She reached up and cupped the side of his face. "Yes," she told him, letting her hand gently trail down his neck. "I intend to be well-rested tomorrow." She pulled back a little, just her fingertips drifting down the outside of his shirt, now.

He went quite still as her touch approached his waist. His eyes widened, all traces of that little smile very satisfyingly gone. He licked his top lip, and she would bet money he was wondering where she was going with this.

Her fingertips slowed as they ghosted past his hipbone. She let her touch trail down the top of his thigh, and then her hand fell naturally to her side.

"I hope you will be, too," she added.

She gave him one innocent look over her shoulder as she headed for the stairs.

#

She must've slept for a good hour or so before she heard him moving around the bedroom. He pulled back the covers, climbed in, arranged himself beside her, and gently kissed her hairline. She suspected that gesture had started as pragmatism, due to their height difference, and become habit no matter how they were situated... but whatever it was, it was sweet in a way she hadn't expected. He wasn't trying to tease her this time. He wasn't even trying to wake her.

But she was awake, and she felt much less tired now.

She opened her eyes, slid her fingers through his hair, and kissed his mouth, gently shifting against him. He made that little startled, pleased noise against her lips, that never failed to disarm her, and she tilted her head to kiss him harder. He needed no encouragement to lick into her mouth. His hand tightened on her hip, then slid up, his fingers tracing patterns on the bare skin of her stomach. He just scraped his teeth against her upper lip, swallowing her soft groan. _Oh._ She— yes. Yes.

She was definitely very awake now. All of her.

Her fingers tightened in his hair, only trying to maneuver his head— but when his breath caught, she relaxed her grip and then did it again.

He broke away to mutter, hoarsely, "I thought you were tired."

"I was." She pushed hard against his shoulder. She'd have to push harder still to actually move him, but he obligingly turned onto his back and tugged her towards him. She crawled on top of him, slid her knees to either side of his thighs, pressed herself down against him, and kissed him again, hot and insistent.

He arched up against her when she tugged at his hair again. His hands began to roam her body, one sliding down to her butt, the other stroking up her back, under her sleep shirt, then around her torso to cup the side of her breast. Her thighs tightened around him even as she tried to turn to get his hand right where she wanted it.

He broke away from her mouth. "Lucy?"

She looked down at him. "Now?" she managed. "Yes?"

Not the smoothest she'd ever been, but she found she didn't care— and neither would he.

His eyes were wide and beautiful. "Whatever— whatever you want, Lucy," he panted.

... she would examine, later, why it gave her such a startling rush of heat to hear those words, in that tone, as he lay solid under her. But first— she shook her head. "No—" She slid off of him, and landed on her side.

He turned towards her, looking understandably confused until she continued, "That's not how this goes. That's not how a partnership _works_ ." She cupped his cheek. "What do _you_ want?"

He stared at her. He licked his lips. "I... want to wake up with you every morning, however many we get," he said softly. "I want to find out with you what kind of future there is for— people like us who've survived a war like _that_ . I wanna help when you stumble, and I want you beside _me_ when— it's too much."

He rolled them so she was on her back, and supported himself above her, knees on either side of her. He had just enough of his weight on her to feel incredibly good. "I want to rediscover peace by your side," he said hoarsely. "I wanna watch your passion for the world _you_ saved. I— I wanna get old and wrinkled with you, still bickering about fin de siècle France." His voice dropped. "I want us to build something beautiful," he admitted. "Lucy. Lucy, I want a _life_ with you."

She stared up at him, speechless.

The breathtaking earnest intensity of his expression eased into a small smirk. "And I wanna make love with you tonight," he added. He bent to tug her shirt down and kiss the very top of her breast. "So, Lucy, what do _you_ —"

She cupped her hand behind his neck.

"— want— mm!"

#

She followed Garcia back to the bedroom, dropping the washcloth in the hamper along the way. Ooooh, she was already feeling it in her thighs and hips, and she'd probably be feeling it in a lot more places before too long.

But soreness aside, she felt very, _very_ good.

She climbed quickly under the covers with him; the night was cold, and she hadn't grabbed her robe. She snuggled against his chest. He wrapped his arm around her waist. It was like she suddenly had her own enormous heated body pillow.

"So," she murmured. "'Gentle and responsive,' that was you projecting?"

His eyes were already half-closed, but he opened them and smiled down at her, a little sheepish. She'd had a respectable amount of sex in her life about which she had absolutely no complaints, but never with someone who took _quite_ so much obvious pleasure in _her_ pleasure.

He chuckled softly.

"What?"

"I was right." The relaxation of sex had turned his voice incredibly low and warm.

"Mmm?"

He hesitated. "You remember the night I, uh..." He swallowed. "Broke down, and you gave me some of Mason's booze—"

"Yeah." Of course she remembered. It would be a long, long time before she could forget him brought to his knees with grief and rage. But she wasn't sure why he wanted to think about that _now_.

"The next morning, I... The way we woke up, I had to wonder for a second if we'd done something besides sleep. I remember thinking, I hope not, I hope she'd look happier than _that_."

She was surprised into laugher. She shifted even closer. "Well, maybe later you can test your theory again."

He kissed her hair. "It would be my pleasure."

She woke again, slowly, to the sun warm on her back, and Garcia warm against her chest.

He'd rolled onto his stomach in the night, prompting some soft snoring, and she was sprawled against his side. He was still sleeping, and she didn't want to wake him. She closed her eyes again and basked in the warmth and the residual endorphins. They'd made love again in the early hours of the morning, and now she was sore _everywhere_ : two different sets of thigh muscles, hips, stomach, _and_ butt muscles. But it was absolutely worth it.

The way it had taken him two uneven breaths to even manage her name, as he stared up at her afterwards...

She smiled.

He soon stirred. "Mmm?"

She waited for him to open his eyes. "Hey." She brushed his hair back from his forehead, feeling...

Huh. She usually felt a little embarrassment, at this stage, even when it was totally unwarranted. But not now.

"Good morning," she added.

He studied her, with a warmth and open appreciation that humbled her. "Yes," he agreed. He kissed her, gentle and leisurely and luxuriating. Then he stretched a little, and— oh, _that_ was not a sight to miss.

She felt like she had kind of a goofy look on her face, but if she looked half as warm and soft as he did, that was okay.

"Coffee?" he suggested. "Food?"

She looked him frankly over, which prompted a surprising bit of pink to spread down his chest. He was unmistakably beautiful, and she'd told him so last night. And sprawled loose-limbed like this, in the sun and her sheets...

She'd enjoyed last night very much. But what really got to her was knowing—

this was just the _beginning_. Much as she'd enjoyed exploring him, touching, tasting, teasing, and letting him do all the same to her... his body was still unfamiliar to her compared to the prospects ahead.

She leaned down to kiss him again before he tried to get up. "I had something else in mind first."

He pulled back and looked at her, endearingly surprised, as if to say, _you want me? Again? Still?_

Yes. She did.

He urged her down onto her back and stretched out on his side next to her, which did fascinating things to his musculature. "Then maybe, Lucy..." He dropped a lingering kiss on the corner of her mouth. "... you'd better..." The edge of her jaw. "... tell me..." That sensitive spot under her jaw, which made her groan. "... _exactly_..." Her neck, and she arched her back. "... what's..." Her collarbone. "... on..." Her breast, and she tried to push up against his mouth, but he pulled away to keep sliding down her body. "... your mind..."

#

He slowly woke to the sounds of running water and Lucy singing enthusiastically.

She had a lovely voice. He hadn't known that about her.

Weeks, months, God willing a lifetime to learn all this about her, stretched out ahead of them. He knew better than anyone how quickly that could change. But this morning, even the memory of those bitter horrors couldn't wreck his hopes.

He was, obviously, floating on a hefty dose of endorphins, but it was more than that. It was the satisfaction of having woken to Lucy sprawled against him with an atypical total unselfconsciousness— the ease of someone deeply sated. It was the reluctance with which she'd untangled her legs from his so she could go shower. It was the shock of discovering that she extended her customary relentless generosity and indefatigable enthusiasm for someone else's good to her _lovers_. It was the way her take-no-prisoners steel had made an appearance, when she'd had him flat on his back... and to say he'd enjoyed that would be a gross understatement.

It was the fact that her impressions of the evening clearly matched his... and that she _had_ made it clear, though he knew how well Lucy could hide when she chose. He'd have to be callow and self-centered indeed to think that unequivocal demonstrativeness was _for_ _him_ , but, nonetheless, _delighted_ was far too frivolous a word to describe how he felt about it.

It was... oh, it was everything.

Despite his best intentions, he hadn't gotten up when she reappeared, wrapped in a faded polka dot towel, her wet hair falling past her shoulders. She smiled at him, a warm, soft look that made _him_ feel helplessly warm and soft.

Then she draped the towel over the bedpost and turned to the closet. He stared, entranced all over again by the light playing across her beautiful creamy skin, by the lines of her hard-won muscle, by the graceful curve of her neck.

She was _breathtaking_.

He swallowed.

She picked out her clothes and turned. Seeing him watching, she looked a little startled, but unmistakably pleased. He did not try to hide his admiration as she dressed, pulling on jeans, and then something green and flowing that inspired a startlingly intense desire to push her up against the wall and slowly peel it right back off of her again.

But they could both use a breather. And he could use a shower. They had time, now. Not enough to take any of it for granted— never enough for that. But time not to rush.

"Breakfast?" he offered, beginning a lazy search of the sheets. He'd been wearing pajamas at _some_ point.

"I'll make it. You shower."

He slid to the end of the bed. She stood in front of him and cupped his face in her hand, stroking her thumb across his cheek. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch, feeling like a cat on the verge of purring. She slid her other arm around his neck and leaned in to kiss him, gentle and drawn-out.

When they pulled apart, it was just far enough to rearrange themselves, so he could wrap his arms around her and hold her close. She sat on his leg and rested her head against his shoulder with a contented noise. He soaked up the feel of her, still warm from her shower, as he cradled the back of her neck.

After a long while, he murmured, voice a little uneven, "You are so very dear to me."

She pulled back.

Her expression was unreadable. Had he offended her somehow? Surely she knew.

She took his face between her hands, and despite not understanding her reaction, he couldn't help closing his eyes again.

"I love you too," she whispered.

His eyes flew open.

She kissed him again, quite thoroughly. Then she headed for the kitchen with a backwards Mona Lisa smile, leaving him staring after her.

... well. He was gonna be useless the rest of the day, wasn't he?

#

Lucy's toes were cold, but even though her clothes were on the floor, the rest of her was very warm. Garcia made an excellent blanket.

He was sleeping deeply and peacefully, and had been for at least... well, Lucy had probably dozed about half an hour herself. Not too surprising; neither of them had gotten as much sleep last night as they'd expected.

She wouldn't sleep again, but she was happy— really, truly, happy— to lie pressed into the curve of the couch, with Garcia stretched out against her, a blanket over about half of him. Earlier, he'd made love to her right here, slow and sweet and gentle, and they'd half-heartedly cleaned up afterwards, but not wanted to _move_.

She _had_ gotten work done that day. Lunch had gotten derailed spectacularly, but she'd managed really quite a bit of reading, considering. She'd also called Jiya, when she texted shortly after breakfast, asking how class had gone.

Jiya had needed a break from job applications, and also from trying to talk her mother out of wedding planning. "After everything, how is _this_ hard?" Jiya had demanded.

Lucy had laughed, a little painfully. "Yeah, tell me about it."

"... so, should I, uh, just not ask about your audible good mood?" Jiya had finally said, towards the end of their shortish call. "You're practically radiating through the phone."

Lucy had cleared her throat. "I'm just, uh. Happy class went well."

Considering she'd just spent about five minutes detailing all the things that had gone _wrong_... Jiya had just let the silence draw itself out.

"... okay, fine. Yes, I am in a good mood. Yes, you could probably guess why. No, I am not sharing any of the details."

"Thank you," Jiya had said drily. Then: "I'm... happy you're happy, though."

Lucy had smiled. "Thank you."

Garcia stirred, drawing her thoughts back to the present. She gently stroked up his arm and across his shoulder. She'd gotten, um... more carried away with her nails, earlier, than she'd thought. But he _definitely_ hadn't complained.

"Lucy?" When he opened his eyes, his eyelids were as heavy as she'd ever seen them.

She smiled up at him. She probably looked like the cat who'd gotten into the cream, because she definitely _felt_ like the cat who'd gotten into the cream. "Hi."

A little rueful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. "I feel like a teenager."

Her eyebrows went up. "Were you having sex like this when you were a teenager? I sure wasn't."

"Fair point," he admitted. He sighed, and sat up. Lucy instantly regretted the loss of his body heat as cold air rushed in to replace it. He shrugged off the blanket and tucked it around her, then started sorting the heap of their clothes.

She yawned. "Dinner?"

"I'll make something."

"It's my turn. You made lunch."

"You made breakfast."

"I made breakfast _successfully_ ," she pointed out. "Lunch turned out both over and undercooked after we had sex up against the kitchen wall. So by that metric, I should be the one to—"

"I was _showering_ while you made breakfast. I _tried_ cooking lunch with you perched on the counter—"

"Hey. _You_ were the one who asked if I'd been marking my territory." Her face flushed.

"And who marked me up in the first place, Lucy?" he demanded, trying not to laugh. "It looks like I went three rounds last night with a vampire and lost."

She felt herself blush even more, but she looked at him from under her eyelids. "I didn't hear you complaining at the time."

"No," he agreed, smirking. "Ah... no."

The way his voice dropped after sex— this could lead to some really amazing positive feedback loops. But while she was _certain_ he'd very happily give her whatever she wanted, even if he couldn't himself go again right now—

She was certain. He'd made his enthusiasm, his almost awed enjoyment, appreciation, very clear. Most of that was probably just Garcia being himself. But some was, perhaps, his clearsighted understanding of what _she_ would benefit from.

... anyway. Yes. She was also a little worn out. Maybe a lot worn out.

But, God, he'd, _they'd_ , made her feel so good.

She sat up, pulled the blanket close around her, and leaned against his side. He put her clothes in her lap and slid his arm around her back. She touched the spot where he'd intercepted a bullet meant for Rufus. It was healed enough that she wouldn't hurt him, but the scar was still the pink of new skin. She reached up and touched the older scar from Chinatown, then the one from Florida. Three bullets, he'd taken, in... what, seven months?

She reached a little farther down and carefully touched another scar. She knew that many of these he probably didn't want to talk about, and she didn't intend to ask. But this one... this one was newer than the recent scar in his leg from Emma's bullet. It was thin and jagged, and she didn't know what it was.

She looked up.

He was watching her. "When I, uh, left the Nebraska base." He licked his lip. "I fought some Rittenhouse agents along the way. I killed all of them, but not before one of them blew my motorcycle up. The shrapnel hit me."

She raised an eyebrow. " _Your_ motorcycle?"

He shrugged.

She considered all the cars they'd stolen in the past, and decided she didn't have much room to ask where he'd gotten the motorcycle.

 _When I left the Nebraska base_. She reached up and turned his face towards her, stroking gently along the lines of ten thousand past frowns. It was hard to believe, sometimes, that the blows had stopped falling.

Believe, and hope.

She touched his smile lines next— he was smiling now— and tried to take them as a promise.

She cleared her throat. "I suggest an old Preston family dinner standby," she said. "Frozen pizza."

They returned to the couch to eat, side-by-side, enjoying the fire— dressed, this time. The urgent heat that had roared up at intervals during the night and day finally felt banked for a while... or, at least, she felt like she could resist pulling them both to the floor _right now_.

Maybe he had a point about teenagers, considering it had taken them nearly twenty-four hours just to take the edge off.

She wasn't so naive as to think the sex was so good because Garcia had some magical, unmatchable prowess as a lover. No, while she definitely wasn't complaining about his deftness, it was more than that. It was the same trust and care and consideration that had brought them into this improbable, indispensable, restorative relationship, paying really fantastic dividends when they slept together.

After dinner they returned to the couch, she with her laptop and readings for next week, he with one of her favorite Abigail Adams biographies.

"Have you always read this fast?" she asked after a while. "Or did you train yourself."

"Always." He looked up at her. "My mother as well. She said that was what got her through engineering school while she worked full-time."

"I would've been so jealous of you in grad school." Lucy shook her head. "What did you think of the Yugoslav Wars book?"

He paused. "Wasn't as inaccurate as it could've been."

Lucy snorted. "So, uh... would you have taken as long to show up here if you'd known about my mom's library?"

Her mom's, and hers. A fair number of the books had _L. Preston_ on the flyleaf, not _C. Preston_.

He paused, and put the book down. "I was getting the last of... some personal effects," he said quietly.

She'd guessed as much, from what he'd said and from the cardboard box on his dresser, though she hadn't looked inside.

"Maybe I'll, ah, show you some of them sometime," he added, rather hesitantly.

She nodded. "I'd like that."

#

She became aware of two things simultaneously: it was morning, and something was blinking on Garcia's nightstand.

Her phone. Her phone was lighting up.

She reached over. Wyatt was calling— and she'd missed seven calls from him. Suddenly, she was awake. "Hello?"

"Lucy?"

She sat up. "What is it? Is everything okay?"

Pause. "... uh, yeah, fine. Are _you_ okay? I couldn't get a hold of you since yesterday, and I thought—"

Lucy remembered the _last_ time she'd been in this house and Wyatt hadn't been able to get her on the phone. "Oh. Sorry, I— Yes, I'm fine. I just wasn't paying attention to my phone yesterday. I was, um..." She cleared her throat. "Busy."

Pause. "Busy?" he asked drily.

"Yes."

She heard Garcia shift behind her. "Is that Wyatt?" he muttered.

Lucy suspected he could hear damn _well_ who it was, but maybe not.

The silence from the other end of the phone became even drier. "Right," Wyatt said. "The platonic roommate."

"Not the word _I_ would use," Garcia began, the damned—

"Call me back later, Lucy." Wyatt didn't sound amused.

"Wait!" She swung her legs out of bed and felt for her robe to pull over her pajamas. "Nope. I'm up. Hi." She padded out to the hall. "I'm glad you called. Why were you calling in the first place?"

"I was just wondering how it went on Friday."

"It went... okay." She gave him a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly as she went downstairs. "In a way, though, I'm glad I started right away. Because next week would be even harder if I hadn't gotten my feet wet first." She turned on the coffee maker. "How're you? How's Grace?"

"Uh, good, just... waiting for a lead on Rittenhouse. Uh, me, not her. She's busy eating, sleeping, and pooping, the usual."

"Ah."

"Jess's mom is helping look after her. I'm going over there tonight, actually. During Jessica's shift. If I get called in, Marian can take over, but if not, she can get some sleep and I'll look after Grace."

"Sounds like a good plan." She hesitated. "I really am sorry I didn't pick up. I didn't mean to worry you. I was doing a lot of reading—"

" _Reading_ , Lucy? C'mon."

"Yes," she said, with dignity. "Would you like a summary of the articles?"

"I'll... pass." He hesitated. "Guess it's a good thing I didn't follow my first impulse and come over to check on you."

"Oh. Um." She sorted through this, and thought it better to steer them out of this part of the conversation. Though most of the scab had long since come off of the wound in their relationship, and the tender skin underneath had healed to a normal resilience... the wound had been deepest here. "It might have been a little awkward, but I would've appreciated the thought."

He snorted.

"Hey, maybe we can all get together next week for dinner or something? I know it'll be a rough week for me, but... hopefully."

"Yeah, I'd like that. Can't promise I won't have to run out, but..."

"If you leave dinner to go hunt Rittenhouse, we'd probably come _with_ you."

"It's not a job for civilians."

"Wyatt—"

"It's not a job for civilians when there are people available who've trained for this for years," he clarified firmly. "This is my job, just like history's yours and piloting is Rufus's. Yeah, we all learned to do a little of each other's jobs 'cause we had to, but... I'm a terrible historian and you're a terrible pilot."

"... fair enough." She opened the refrigerator and began scouting for breakfast possibilities. "Hey... have you thought about what to get Rufus and Jiya as a wedding present?"

He paused. "World peace?"

They talked a few minutes longer as Lucy chopped some spinach, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Garcia came downstairs shortly after they hung up; she suspected he'd been waiting until then.

She looked at him. "You're _not_ going to taunt Wyatt. I shouldn't even have to say this, Garcia."

He looked abashed. "No," he agreed. "That... wasn't actually my intention, but I won't pretend my intentions were totally pure, either." He hesitated. "I'm sorry."

"All right."

He made them both coffee and set out two plates and forks for the omelette she was making. When he glanced sideways at her a few moments later, she gave him a little smile, and something eased in his expression.

"Plans for today?" he asked her after they'd started eating.

"Reading. Class prep. Laundry. You?"

"I thought I'd go to the grocery store."

"I'm giving you money this time."

"Lucy—"

She stared him down.

"... all right."

She worked steadily through the morning and early afternoon. Garcia went to the store and came back. She promptly paid him back.

In mid afternoon, she looked up from her laptop. "Garcia?"

He looked up from his book.

She cleared his throat. "I'm sore. Are you?"

He was in better shape than she was, but his recent life hadn't included having sex six times in thirty-six hours any more than hers had.

"Yes," he admitted.

"My mother's— bathroom has that enormous bathtub..." She hesitated. "And I need to start going through that room anyway." She barreled on before he could question that: "I think I'm going to... clean it and soak later, if you want to join me."

"How big is this bathtub, exactly?"

"Big enough."

He nodded. "Shall I clean it for you?"

"No. Thank you."

The next time she was ready for a break, she headed for the stairs. Garcia had been reading in the library for a change, but she found him right behind her once she reached the top.

She stopped outside the half-open door, then nudged it open.

Even before she stepped inside, the room smelled like Mom. She should've expected that, but it slammed her across the metaphorical knees anyway. The smell brought back memories of curling up in bed beside Mom when Dad and Amy had been on a trip and Lucy had had a nightmare, of rainy days with grilled cheese sandwiches, of all the times she'd borrowed Mom's clothes.

She straightened her shoulders and took a deep, deliberate breath. Then she went in.

The late afternoon sunshine streamed through the dust motes. The dresser, the nightstand, the bed, the closet door half ajar... everything looked like Mom had just stepped out for a few hours. Had she left it this way... the morning of the day she'd kidnapped Lucy? Or had she come back at some point afterwards?

Lucy took two more steps and stopped. "Garcia?"

"Yes."

"I need to do this alone."

Pause. "You'll tell me if that changes?"

"Yeah."

"All right." She heard him go.

She blinked back tears. Then she started removing the reminders of her mother's presence.

It would hurt to leave things as they were. It hurt to change them, too. She started by stripping the bed, dumping all the bedding in a heap on the floor. The sight of the bare bed was painful and cathartic.

She threw open the windows and let the cold winter air stream in. She moved to the dresser. She swept the jewelry and little mementoes into the open top drawer without looking at them too closely, then added everything from the top of the nightstand. She put all the bottles of hand cream, perfume, sunscreen, and moisturizer together, ready to be dumped unceremoniously into a trash bag. This once, she wouldn't worry about recycling.

She steeled herself, and opened the bathroom door. Cosmetics, contacts paraphernalia, toothbrush and toothpaste, all went straight into the trash. She emptied the drawers similarly, shoving the few things she might want to keep into the top one. The worst were the linens: bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth shriveled bone dry in the crumples Mom had left the last time.

Lucy chucked them all through the door behind her into the bedroom. Then she opened this window, too, ripped off a swath of toilet paper, and sank down on top of the toilet, eyes burning and throat aching.

She swallowed hard, wiped her eyes, got the cleaning supplies from under the sink, and started to clean everything. Toilet; basin and counter; then the giant bathtub. Her hand was cramping when she was done, but the bare, impersonal spaces brought her the first relief she'd felt since leaving the hallway.

She put a clean hand towel on the rack, stacked two bath towels and two washcloths on the counter, and left the bathroom. She opened the closet; the smell hit her again. She went through the rack of accessories until she found the pale blue silk scarf that she wanted. She crumpled it in her hand and walked out of the bedroom.

She turned the corner and stopped before she tripped over Garcia, sitting with his legs stretched across the hallway. "... have you been here the whole time?"

He looked up. "I did imply I'd be within earshot."

It felt like it would take too much energy to step over him, so she sank down beside him. She looked at him bleakly, eyes starting to blur.

He put down his book and handed her the tissue box from his other side.

"... I love you." She didn't manage to put any sound behind the choked-off squeak, but he might've understood anyway. She grabbed a tissue, pressed it to her eyes, and tried to get control of herself.

Finally she swallowed hard and put down the tissue. Garcia was just watching her patiently, waiting.

"Wash the bedding for me?" she asked quietly. "And— the towels that are on the bed. And pack it away?"

He stood, and offered her a hand up.

She hung the scarf in her own closet. She went downstairs, opened the coat closet, and pressed her face into his jacket for a while, until the smell of him was all that filled her nose. Then she took a deep breath and went back to the kitchen.

They'd both accumulated a small stack of books on the island, and she almost sat down at the wrong spot. But hers had the biography of Jane Addams on top; his had that Yugoslav Wars book. On the bottom was Mom's latest edition of the old venerable military atlas that Lucy had poured over for hours as a kid, tracing various battles and offensives. In between was a new notebook he must've gotten at the grocery store, and some old paper copies of articles he must've gotten out of Mom's files. Her professional curiosity was terribly aroused, but she wasn't going to pry.

He saw her looking when he came in from the laundry room. "Do you mind?"

"Mi biblioteca es tu biblioteca." She kissed his cheek when he sat down again. "And— thanks," she added quietly.

He looked up at her. "Any time, Lucy," he told her, soft and serious.

She stared at him. When she'd first moved in with him, she hadn't let herself consider the full weight of that promise. Now that how much they meant to each other was very clear...

She slid her arms around him, only to have him stand. He took her into his own arms and held her close. She turned her head and rested it against his broad, solid chest, letting him pretty much hold her up as well.

It was a few minutes before either of them got back to work.

"I can cook dinner tomorrow," she told him that evening, as they were eating some really good pasta.

He looked at her. "Do you _want_ to cook?"

"Um." After teaching? She tried again: "I can bring dinner home tomorrow."

He almost smiled. "I don't mind doing it, Lucy."

She decided to save her energy. "Okay. Thank you."

"Of course."

She took a few more bites. Then: "I wasn't expecting to stay here. And I don't think I can."

"This house?" he guessed.

She nodded. "I was, uh... thinking of selling it. It's a big house. I could probably buy a smaller one outright with what it would bring."

He glanced at her, and took a bite without saying anything.

"You'd be okay with something smaller, right?"

"Of course." He relaxed a little.

In time, she hoped, she'd learn to believe, at the visceral level, he wasn't going anywhere, and he'd learn to believe she had _really_ meant it when she asked him to stay.

Speaking of, there was another topic she'd been putting off all weekend. Sex was always more fun than paperwork. "Tomorrow I have to go by HR, getting everything reinstated."

He nodded.

"I thought... it would make sense to add you to my health insurance. As a domestic partner."

He put his fork down, his expression unreadable. She waited.

"How much is it?" he asked finally.

"I'm... not asking you to cover it. And it's cheaper than getting it on your own."

"Lucy—"

"It doesn't mean you have to stick around," she said quietly. "I'm just trying to be practical."

He stared at her. "You think I'm concerned about _that_?"

"What are you concerned about?"

He shook his head slowly. "It's, uh, just been a while since I had to think about any of this." He cleared his throat. "Homeland Security unfroze the rest of my accounts. They were, uh, seized, so..."

"You didn't use them to finance your missions."

"Right. So I can... I don't know what I'm going to do, but I don't intend to leech off of you, Lucy."

She put her own fork down. "Garcia, I don't mind supporting both of us if that's what you need."

He looked at her blankly.

"I think you should keep doing what you're doing now for as long as you need," she added.

"That," he said hoarsely after a minute, "is not why I accepted your invitation."

"I know."

He cleared his throat. "That, uh... yes. To adding me, I mean. Please. But, uh... next weekend let's divide up the household expenses, yes?"

"Garcia..."

"Provisionally, at least."

She could accept that. "All right."

"... Lucy?"

She looked up.

He hesitated. "I don't remember what normal is and I'll probably screw it up," he admitted.

"Garcia—"

He shook his head. "But, uhhh..." He licked his top lip. "I'm glad I'm figuring it out with you."

 _Oh_. Warmth bloomed in her chest, and she smiled at him.

She cleaned the few dishes after dinner. "Still want that bath?"

Mindful of his size, she ran only enough warm water to take the chill off the fiberglass, before they climbed in. He looked rather oversized and crowded in the tub, and when she got in, too, it was worse. The only way for them to sit was with her between his legs, leaning back against his chest. There was less space than she'd expected, and— it was a little awkward.

But she gamely dumped in some bath salts anyway— the unscented and therapeutic kind, from her own stash, not Mom's. And as the hot water rose, so did her conviction that this had actually been a good idea.

She turned off the tap with her foot, and relaxed against him. She felt the tension slowly ease out of him, too. She sighed softly. He shifted her into a slightly more comfortable position, and the hot water lapped at her skin.

She turned her head against his chest until she could hear his heartbeat. His fingers traced leisurely patterns along her side.

The room, the house, was very quiet; all she heard was their soft breathing. It occurred to her it was good they'd waited, for more reasons than one: the walls in the Nebraska base had not been particularly thick.

The heat eased the low-grade ache in her muscles. There was something a little farcical about the way they'd worn each other out, but really, this was a win-win situation: they'd both certainly enjoyed _becoming_ sore, and now they were relaxing together.

Maybe 'worn out' was overstating it. All that kept her from gauging his interest in more was knowing she'd have a long day tomorrow... followed by four more.

She reached down and slid her fingers through his. He bent and kissed the back of her neck.

"Is this all right?" she murmured.

"Very," he assured her.

She closed her eyes.

"Lucy."

"... mmm."

"Water's going cold."

Yes, but she was so drowsy she just...

"Lucy." He sounded amused.

"What," she muttered.

"The water's cold and you're asleep."

"I know."

"C'mon." He gently kissed the curve of her neck. Then he reached past her to open the drain, heaved them both to their feet with tremendous splashing, and held her up while he reached for their towels. Reluctantly, Lucy got out and dried off as the draining water gurgled.

Most of her hair was dry. She blotted the ends and wrapped the towel around herself again. She felt so incredibly relaxed, and her eyelids were heavy.

"Garcia?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"Thank you." She looked up at him. "For not letting me go after David Rittenhouse."

She owed the same to Rufus, and she would tell him. But now— she needed to say this to Garcia.

He'd stopped what he was doing and was just staring down at her, eyes wide and dark in the low light over the sink. "Lucy," he breathed.

"I didn't understand that I could be this happy again after the war. I never expected this." She looked up at him.

She hadn't understood in the first days in this house, either. The war had seemed to dominate everything. But while adjusting was painful... the more things she had to look forward to, the less time she spent thinking about the war.

It would never go away. Life didn't work that way. It would always be behind them, but maybe one day, it would _be_ behind them.

"Lucy," Garcia repeated. He looked winded, as if he couldn't manage anything else. He rested his hands on her shoulders, thumbs drawing little circles along the top of her chest, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Finally he crouched, awkwardly, one hand resting behind her knee. "May I?"

It took her a moment to understand what he meant. Then she nodded. He very gently picked her up and carried her through the bedroom and down the hall to his own. He set her down on the bed, draped their towels over the bedpost, crawled in behind her, and pulled the covers over them both. She snuggled back against him. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pressed his face against her hair, and held her like she were precious.

#

Rufus and Jiya were married at city hall on the Friday before Thanksgiving. And maybe it was a cliché, but they both _glowed_.

Wyatt glanced at Lucy as the two of them trailed behind on their way to take care of the paperwork. She looked good, too. Well, Lucy _always_ looked good, but today she was radiant, in some dark red thing that somehow didn't look horrible next to Jiya's sunshiney yellow dress. Part of that was no doubt her being happy for Jiya and Rufus, because that was just the kind of person Lucy _was_. And the rest, well—

Wyatt felt a twinge of the old jealousy, the old regret, that it wasn't him who'd made her this happy. He prodded at the tiny, awful part of him where it was still like sandpaper to see her like this and think about what might have been, because he always needed to keep tabs on just how much of a bastard he was. But then he just... stopped. Any day was a stupid day to do that, but today especially. And mostly? He was just _glad_. She deserved happiness, too.

He got a little dust in his eyes signing his name as a witness on the official paperwork, but Rufus and Jiya were so wrapped up in each other that they didn't notice. Lucy noticed. Her smile was warm and sympathetic and he knew she wouldn't ever tell.

They were halfway back to the rest of the group when the room opened up. Lucy went to get everyone else; Wyatt trailed Jiya and Rufus to where the officiant was waiting. Rufus was staring at Jiya _so_ hard that Wyatt had to grab him and steer him away from the door frame, into the actual, y'know, doorway.

"Thanks man," Rufus said absently.

Wyatt snorted, and shook his head. At least Rufus remembered the right words. All two of them.

The photographer Jiya's mom had hired clicked away through the whole thing. Wyatt'd given him a thorough once-over when he first appeared, then glanced at Agent Christopher. She'd given him a tiny nod. Hopefully that meant the photographer had been cleared, and Wyatt wouldn't have to pull a damn gun at his best friend's wedding. Lucy's mom's funeral had been bad enough.

Besides the four of them and Agent Christopher and the photographer, there was Rufus's mom and Kevin, and Mrs. Marri; Connor and Flynn; a heavily pregnant blonde lady in purple— Stasia, that was it, Jiya's old roommate— and two old Mason Industries employees. Wyatt thought they were Marv and Parvi, but he wasn't sure.

"You may now kiss," the officiant announced, which Wyatt hadn't expected at a courthouse wedding. But Rufus and Jiya took full—

... Okay, geez, guys.

The officiant finally cleared his throat, and the room dissolved into laughter.

As they filed out, Wyatt couldn't help remembering his own wedding. He glanced at Flynn ahead of him and wondered if he was thinking the same thing. But the universe _owed_ it to Jiya and Rufus to have their marriage turn out better than either of those, and Wyatt didn't even believe in that kind of thing but he would for today.

At the restaurant Rufus and Jiya had chosen, they had a little back room to themselves, with an oval table and a buffet table. Flynn politely helped Lucy out of her coat—

Even Wyatt had to admit that Flynn's glance at the curve of Lucy's neck and shoulder, exposed by the neckline of her dress, wasn't anything near a leer. But still, that blink-and-you-miss-it look prompted a startling, visceral, white-hot stab of jealousy straight into Wyatt's gut.

He turned away, hands shaking, so Lucy wouldn't see, and didn't look up until he had himself under control again. Jesus. He thought— he thought it was Flynn's totally unconscious admiration, like— like he had a _right_ now—

Which, he did.

 _Get a fucking grip_ , he told himself. _You thought they were sleeping together ever since Chinatown. How is this any worse? Lucy's happy. She's_ happy.

Wyatt might be a little lonely. The tenderness in that damn look of Flynn's might remind him that he didn't have anyone, not like _that_ . But he had his best friend back— _both_ his best friends back. Which, he'd worked to repair his relationship with Lucy, but getting Rufus back was just...

Was just grace. Which he also had, and he would not trade _her_ for anything. No matter how lonely he got.

Wyatt ended up with Stasia on his right, who had Jiya on her other side, and Lucy to his left, who had Flynn on _her_ other side. "So, uh, what do you do?" he asked Stasia, to be polite.

"I work for the NSA."

Oh, the dicks who'd taken over Mason Industries for Rittenhouse? Okay, fine, they had lots of different divisions, Agent Christopher had said they'd cleaned house thoroughly after Agent Neville's arrest, partially just from the embarrassment of being shown up by Homeland Security—

To his left, Lucy had gone still and stiff. What? Wyatt glanced at her, then _past_ her. Oh.

He exchanged speaking looks with Lucy. Hopefully she could keep Flynn from causing a scene, right?

After a minute, Flynn relaxed. The only sign that he knew he was sitting three seats away from someone from the agency that'd sold out him and his girls was the way he cut into his chicken like it was a throat he didn't like.

Stasia hadn't missed this little drama. She raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment. "And what about you?"

"I'm in the Army."

"Ahhh. So, you were involved with the thing where Jiya disappeared for a year and can't tell anyone why."

Wyatt made a non-committal noise, which got him a sharp, amused look.

"No presents, I notice," Stasia said, gamely trying her own topic.

"Oh... uh, some of us pitched in for something, so we just put it in a card." He and Lucy and Connor and Denise and Flynn'd all gone in for some flight vouchers and hotel nights so that when Rufus and Jiya finally _did_ have time off, they could go somewhere nice. Maybe not the most creative thing, but... hey. After everything, time alone where no one was trying to kill them was probably one of the nicest things they could give those two.

Stasia nodded. "I understand. I was not sure if they would open gifts in private, and I thought they'd prefer to do so with mine, so I delivered it the other day."

"Mmm." Wyatt wasn't gonna ask.

"Klingon marital aids," she explained.

He choked on a poorly-timed swallow.

Flynn reached around Lucy and pounded him enthusiastically on the back until Wyatt could recover enough to swat him away. "It's, ah, bad luck to the happy couple to die at their reception, Wyatt," Flynn said, smirking.

"You're all heart." Wyatt's voice came out raspy. At least the other half of the table had been laughing at something Mrs. Carlin'd said that had _sounded_ like 'ocean of lace and nineteen bridesmaids,' so no one had really noticed him.

Lucy looked concerned. "Are you okay?"

"Peachy," he managed, taking a drink. You know what, he'd been talking with Stasia so Jiya could talk with Rufus, 'cause his mom had taught him _some_ manners, once upon a time... but Jiya and Rufus had the rest of their lives together. They'd cope.

"How are your, uh, students? The other ones." What was a sneaky-enough way of saying _you know, those people from the 19_ _th_ _century you're being a life coach for?_

She got it. "They seem to be coping. I don't hear from them as much as I expected, except for Judith. She's working on her GED. Ironically, getting her an ID is turning out to be harder than her actually learning the material."

Not surprising. If she was smart enough to learn to pilot the Mothership, she was smart enough to easily fill in the— probably pretty big— gaps in her nineteenth-century education. "Can't Agent Christopher help with that?"

"She is, or it would be hopeless." Lucy smiled at him. "How's Grace? Do you have any new pictures?"

"Uh..."

She gave him a pointed look. "How _many_ new pictures do you have, Wyatt?"

Busted. He took out his phone. "One or two." ... dozen.

The conversations seemed to reach kind of a natural pause around the time Lucy handed his phone back. She suddenly looked nervous. She took a sheet of paper from her bag, stood, and—

Oh. Wyatt got the room's attention for her. That didn't make her look any _less_ nervous, but she gamely soldiered on.

"We're... all here because we love Jiya and Rufus, obviously," she began—

"Hear, hear!" Connor called. Yeah, he was maybe a little drunk already.

"— and, as is traditional, I thought we'd embarrass them with a wedding toast." She smiled over at Jiya and Rufus. "Um... over the past year, they've become two of my closest friends, and I can't think of two braver, kinder, sweeter people who deserve each other more."

She had to pause for applause.

"So, to Rufus and Jiya..." She looked down at her notes. "May your marriage have all the tenacity of a Wookie, the cohesiveness of the Borg, the wisdom of Yoda, the power of a warp drive, the strength of a rancor... and the passion of Captain Kirk and his alien babes." She raised her glass. "To Jiya and Rufus, and a marriage that is out of this world."

"Jiya and Rufus!" everyone echoed.

When she sat down again, Wyatt nudged her. "Thanks for not doing it in Klingon."

"I left that for you, Mr. Four Languages."

"Oh? _Shame_ that didn't occur to me."

"What if I told you I had it in my bag for you to read?"

He gave her a Look. She smirked back at him.

He supposed it was his turn, though. He stood, and cleared his throat. "Well, it's my turn, now, and, luckily, I've not only worked with Rufus and Jiya for the past year, I've lived with them, too. So, I thought I'd start off with the story of why we started keeping bleach under the sink—"

"Set phasers to 'kill,'" Jiya muttered, just loud enough to be heard.

He smirked at her, and turned serious. "Okay, as some of you know, Jiya and Rufus were, uh, separated earlier... and I have _never_ seen anything to equal Jiya's determination to get— to bring Rufus home. Seriously. If I told you what she did, Agent Christopher would have to drag me out of here, but... it's not an understatement to say she moved heaven and earth."

Okay, Jiya looked on the verge of tears. Maybe he shouldn't have brought that up.

"And as for Rufus—" Wyatt studied his best friend, and smiled. "As for Rufus," he continued, "I don't know when I've ever seen a man more devoted to the love of his life."

Jiya turned to Rufus and gave him what must've been an incandescent smile. They did that thing where it seemed like they forgot anyone else was in the room.

"So, I don't have to tell you that I hope you'll be happy, because... I know you will be. After what you guys have already done to be together? This marriage thing'll be a piece of cake." He cleared his throat. "So, here's to two geniuses in love."

God, it was dusty in here.

After they toasted and the room quieted again, he glanced to his left. "... Flynn?"

"No." Flynn looked across the table at Jiya and Rufus. "You're welcome."

Probably a good call.

A minute or two went by, making it clear no one else was going to join in. On the other side of the table, Marv leaned past Kevin and asked Rufus, "Hey, you never told me about the new job. Where are you going to be working? Did you take the job at Google?"

"Um, actually," Rufus said. "We'll be working with Connor."

Marv stared. "You're going to be his employees again?"

"Business partners," Connor corrected.

"I thought you were, uh," Parvi said.

"Destitute? Well, yes, essentially... but I still retained my patents. I realized I could license some of the less, shall we say, politically inflammatory ones. Specifically, I'm licensing my patent on durable electronics to a number of manufacturers." Connor beamed at the room. "That, plus, I was able to persuade a few investors of the likelihood of the success of our new venture, giving us a small pot of seed money."

"What _is_ your new venture?" Lucy asked.

"Oh, hadn't I mentioned? Renewable energy. Solar cells, specifically. I'm thinking of calling it MaSun industries." His smile widened.

"We're still talking about that," Rufus sighed.

"Our goal is to have a working prototype of a non-concentrating, single-layer solar cell with sixty percent efficiency by the end of 2019," Connor added.

Wyatt frowned. "That seems low," he muttered.

"Theoretical maximum is around thirty three percent," Flynn replied quietly.

Wyatt looked at him. "Why do _you_ know that?"

"I know a lot of things, Wyatt."

"And, once we've got that, the world is, truly, our oyster." Connor beamed at the room again.

Wyatt shook his head. "Anyone else get a bad feeling now when Connor starts getting all, uh..."

"Megalomaniacal?" Flynn suggested quietly. The other side of the table had their backs to and near the door, and the restaurant outside was busy, so this snarky little side conversation wouldn't be overheard.

"Exactly." Wyatt glanced at Agent Christopher, but she didn't look alarmed. Or surprised. Well, Connor was— had been— living in her spare room, this wouldn't be news to her. "I guess after inventing time travel, revolutionizing the geo-political balance of energy power is small potatoes."

"So." Connor stood, and reached for his glass. "Here's to—" He glanced around, and seemed to suddenly realize he'd hijacked a wedding reception. "Here's to Jiya and Rufus," he finished smoothly, but not smoothly enough, if the muffled laughter was any indication.

But it was quickly swallowed by a chorus of "To Jiya and Rufus," and then clinking glasses.

"Where are you locating?" Marv asked. "The old site was—"

"San Diego," Rufus said.

The room got quiet. Wyatt glanced sideways at Lucy. "You know about this?"

She shook her head.

"It's quite a bit cheaper, and, ah, the sunshine is much more even throughout the year," Connor added. "Which seems relevant... under the circumstances."

"We're going down next weekend to find an apartment, actually," Jiya said.

Wyatt looked at Lucy again. This felt like—

This felt like an ending.

She gave him a wobbly smile that suggested she knew _exactly_ how he felt. "I'm really happy for them," she murmured, while blinking back a few tears. Ladies and gentlemen, Lucy Preston.

People began to shuffle seats. Wyatt got up for more food. Someone started the music. "Is this—" Wyatt began, sitting next to Lucy. Flynn was off somewhere— oh, there, deep in conversation with Agent Christopher.

"A disco version of the Star Wars theme?" Lucy looked pained. "Sounds like it."

Wyatt snorted. "So, guess the band's breaking up," he said after a quiet minute or two.

Lucy stole some fancy hors d'oeuvre thing off his plate. "Guess so." Her eyes were a little watery again, and not because of the spicy shrimp.

He cleared his throat. If she didn't want to talk about this, he wasn't gonna make her. "Any, uh... Thanksgiving plans?"

"Actually, yes." Her wry look couldn't conceal her excitement. "Denise and Michelle invited us—"

Wyatt nodded. "Me, too."

"— but Judith and Tom and Peter don't have anywhere to go, so... Garcia and I are hosting."

"Oh. Nice." He had learned not to question anything about her kitchen competence, even if it was a big step from cooking one or two dishes to putting together an entire Thanksgiving dinner.

"Garcia's doing the turkey, not me," she added wryly. "Says he has experience. _And_ , my grandfather is coming." She smiled, warm and happy.

Wyatt knew she'd been having lunch with Ethan regularly, once a week or so. The team... okay, if he were being honest, the team was family now. But he was real glad that she had at least one biological family member who wasn't a dick. Seemed like a great guy, actually.

And— Wyatt'd seen Lucy's face when Emma had told her Ethan was dead. He _definitely_ remembered how Lucy had wanted to take off on a suicide run afterwards— and that hadn't even been the first _time_ , apparently. Wyatt had cornered Rufus, later, and gotten the story about Lucy wanting to take the time machine back to kill that original Rittenhouse dick—

_what the fuck, Lucy._

— and, he just— he was just really, really glad Lucy had Ethan left.

"What about you?" Lucy added. "Do you..."

"The Codys invited me." It would be Grace and Marian and Jessica and Kevin, and Miguel, Kevin's boyfriend.

She studied him. "Are you going to go?"

"I... think so, yeah." Because he wanted to be where Grace was. And because... messy as it was, they _were_ his family.

But it was pretty messy.

"How is Jessica?" she added.

"She's... she's fine. I know, uh, Agent Christopher is still keeping tabs on her to make sure she's not, you know... secretly working for Rittenhouse."

It came out bitterer than he'd expected. Lucy looked surprised, too.

Wyatt tried not to think about Jessica these days, mostly 'cause he didn't know _what_ to think. Would've been a lot easier if they hadn't been, y'know, raising a kid together.

"... Wyatt?"

He realized he'd stabbed a piece of chicken a little too hard and stared at it a little too long. "I don't _know_ her," he blurted. "The Jessica I married wasn't— she wasn't a Rittenhouse pawn, Lucy. She didn't lie to me her whole _life_."

Lucy nodded. "You don't know her," she agreed. "But do you want to?"

Wyatt's head snapped up. God, sometimes Lucy was so perceptive it was— at some point in history, she would've been burned as a witch.

Oh, right. Carol had actually tried that.

"... dunno," he muttered, hoping Lucy's X-ray vision suddenly started malfunctioning.

Look, it was— _complicated_ . This Jessica technically _hadn't_ lied to him her whole life, she'd mostly lied to a different version of him. Who'd apparently been kind of a jerk. If— if he, the real Wyatt, had been there, would she...?

"I'm pretty sure she's still in love with you," Lucy added.

That jolted him. He felt a dizzying mix of hope and depression. God, it was so complicated. Why couldn't he just walk away and move on and find another woman to love without all this _shit_ in the background?

"We both know I'm awful at moving on," he muttered. "What if this is just that? What if I'm just— clinging to the past? To the Jessica I actually knew?" And loved?

"What if I fuck things up _again_ and it hurts Grace?" he added. "I want _better_ for her. I want—" He hesitated. "I wanna be a good dad," he said quietly.

"Wyatt, you _are_."

He looked down.

"I don't have any easy answers, Wyatt," she said quietly. "But it's up to you if you forgive her. If you want to see if you and she might have a future together. It's not up to me or Rufus. So if that _is_ what you want, stop feeling guilty about it."

... Well, Lucy's X-ray vision definitely wasn't malfunctioning.

"Thanks," he muttered. Then glanced up to make sure she knew he wasn't being surly, he was just _overwhelmed_.

Lucy glanced off to the side, to Flynn, who was still— who was talking to Stasia now, actually. Huh. Well, it was only Wyatt's job to prevent bloodshed if she was Rittenhouse. And maybe if Lucy asked, because, he liked her. But while Flynn and Stasia both looked a little _wary_ , no one showed signs of going for the throat.

Jiya and Rufus were driving to some out-in-the-country inn for two nights, so not long after that, the party wound down. Wyatt was behind the two of them in the hallway outside the banquet room when they ran into a guy on his way to the bathroom.

"Hey!" the guy greeted them cheerily. Well, Rufus and Jiya. Well, Rufus.

Rufus looked confused.

"Star Wars fan, I see," the guy said, nodding to the gift bag Rufus was carrying, which had a picture of the head of that blue-and-white robot. "Me too. I mean, slave Leia, am I right?" He laughed.

Rufus stared at him, mouth slightly open. "Yeah, man," he said, sarcasm evident, at least to Wyatt. "I like slave Leia too. My favorite part is when she takes her own chain and uses it to slowly kill the guy who put her in slavery. Super metal, right?"

The smile slowly slid off the face of the guy, who was maybe a little drunk. Wyatt's mouth twisted into its own little smile. The guy opened his mouth, and then he just kinda shook his head and kept going.

"'Slave' is _in the name_ ," Rufus said in disbelief. " _Why_ do these mouth-breathing fetishizers— mm!"

Jiya had grabbed his face and kissed him. Rufus put down the bag and slid his arms around her, fingers sliding into her fancy hairdo. That went on for a while. Again.

"What's the— oh," came Flynn's voice behind them.

Wyatt turned to see him and Lucy. "Uh, yeah." The hallway was narrow and Rufus and Jiya were in the middle of it. He wasn't gonna try to squeeze past them, but could they maybe stop with the enthusiastic makeouts in tight spaces where he was bottlenecked with Lucy and Flynn?

But they'd never been this public and enthusiastic about it before... Chinatown. So he _definitely_ wasn't gonna say anything. He was just gonna... ugh, stand here awkwardly.

The two of them finally came up for air. And had the chutzpah to look surprised at their awkward audience.

"Great," Wyatt said. "Think you could let us out?"

He just— he was happy for everyone and he also felt like a damn fifth wheel, okay? Just let him get out of there, and— yeah.

Rufus and Jiya drove off as Kevin pelted the car with handfuls of bird seed. "I came up with something better than cans," Connor told them all. "The noisemakers are affixed to the bumper with a fastener that's specifically _designed_ to fail at velocities between 53 and 57 miles per hour. They think they got away, and then they hit the highway, and—"

Wyatt looked over at Agent Christopher. "He's not driving home, right?"

Wyatt had parked near Lucy and Flynn. "I'll start the car," Flynn said, and went on ahead.

Lucy frowned and felt in her bag. "How does he keep _doing_ that?"

"Doing what?"

"Getting the keys."

Wyatt snorted. They walked a little ways.

"Lunch next week," she suggested, "or are you busy?"

"If I don't get called in, sure." They'd hit Rittenhouse twice so far, once right in the Bay Area, once up near Cannon Beach. His new team—

Wow, that felt weird to say, even in his head.

— his new team was a little green, some of them, but he'd had one young guy take a shot to the thigh and that was it. No fatalities.

Just _having_ a new team was weird, but having them all be soldiers was also weird. Being in charge was _also_ weird.

"Mondays and Tuesdays are your light days, right?" She taught all five days and then she did office hours two of those days. He thought he remembered that Thursdays might also be good, but that obviously wouldn't work this week.

"My lighter days, yes."

"How 'bout we plan Monday and Tuesday can be the backup?"

"Sounds good. There's a little place off-campus we can try. I'll text you the address and let you know when I'm done with the Monday seminar, okay?"

"Sure." They'd reached her car. She reached out and gave him a hug, which he happily returned.

"Take care of yourself," she said.

"You always tell me that."

"Huh, yeah, I wonder why I feel like I have to."

They looked at each other for a moment. Then his face broke into a smile. "Don't worry," he promised—

"Wyatt, I always worry."

"Don't worry," he repeated. "We cut Rittenhouse's damn head off, I'm not gonna let a dead snake kill me now."

"Good."

"... see you, Lucy," he said after a minute. She gave him a little wave, and he headed for his own car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **No finale spoilers in the comments.** I couldn't see it over the holidays, so so far I've assiduously avoided spoilers by scrupulously staying away from Twitter and Tumblr. So don't put them here!
> 
> I'll watch when I have time to tweet my first watch like I did for the other episodes, just for old time's sake.
> 
> Notes:
> 
> Sexual transmission of hep C is actually uncommon. But it’s still important to know your status, both for obvious treatment reasons and because transmission can occur in other domestic situations (for example, sharing razors). This has been a PSA.
> 
> I’m not a historian. I’ve made that clear, right? Details of Lucy’s professional life are my best guesses and handwaving.
> 
> You can’t actually get married with this many guests at SF city hall. Shhh.
> 
> Theoretical efficiency for a single layer of solar cells was thought to be 33% using silicon, but these two awesome scientists have suggested it’s really 44% using perovskite: <https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/10/17/solar-panel-theoretical-efficiency-limit-increases-by-33/> A 60% efficiency single layer cell would change the world. In a lot of places, unsubsidized wind or solar energy is now cost-competitive with natural gas; in most places, wind and solar are cheaper than coal; in some places, _new_ wind and solar are cheaper than _existing_ natural gas/coal. 60% efficient cells would outcompete fossil fuels almost everywhere.
> 
> Speaking of, I don’t like soapboxes. But I do like having a livable planet. So if you’re reading this? Consider what you can do to shift our global conversation so we might get to keep our planet. The tools are there. All we need is the political will. And we build that one conversation at a time.
> 
> Would you like to hear the disco Star Wars theme? Of course you would. It’s by Meco, and you can find it here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecuKOcPzAJ8>
> 
> Finally, venomous snakes can bite and kill hours after being decapitated, which Wyatt, as a Texan, would (hopefully!) know well. Another reason why you should just leave snakes alone.


	13. Out Of The Tree Of Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CN: references to:** homophobia, biphobia, child abuse, war, ethnic cleansing, miscarriage, pressure about reproductive choices
> 
>  **on-screen:** violence, dating violence
> 
> **No finale spoilers in the comments.**
> 
>  I know I promised you an epilogue. I’m desolated to have to inform you, that’s not what you’re getting here. So: if you felt like the last chapter wrapped things up satisfactorily, well and good, go in peace. If you’d like to know what happens next, here’s a little more. 55K words of more, in fact, so proceed with caution.

Sitting was underrated. He felt like he could say that with authority, after running for his life in five consecutive centuries.

Just sitting, with a cup of tea, looking at their little Christmas tree on the table by the balcony… this was nice.

The binary tree he and Anthony had printed on the 3d printer after too much eggnog was on the other table. Instead of a red-black tree, it was a red-green tree. What? _He_ thought it was funny.

But, okay, a lot harder to decorate. On the normal tree, he and Jiya had managed to fit one string of lights, and then their heterogeneous collection of ornaments: colored balls from Mom, Spock Santa, the Grinch, Tron, and so on. In the place of pride, dangling above the tree with fishing line standing in for the Force, was his engagement Yoda, wearing a Santa hat with earholes.

Hey, he should write a little program to make the lights go on and off in time with Christmas music. He’d need a program that scanned the songs ahead of time and designated the beats and flourishes, and then another program that randomized the light display— or, he’d probably want to get new lights, because these were boringly wired in series—

Okay, maybe ‘little’ was the wrong adjective.

Maybe for tonight he should just sit and enjoy the tree and the fact that they’d finally gotten the apartment mostly together and the fact that they were _here_ together and no one was shooting at them and…

Not that they had no worries. They were trusting a lot to another scheme of Connor’s, and look how that had turned out last time. And, sure, maybe solar panels weren’t any more of a jump from time travel than time travel was from cars…

But, honestly? Some part of him just wanted to stop running risks for a while. Wanted to know they wouldn’t be looking for jobs again in six months or a year. Did that make him a coward? Or just tired?

He and Jiya were both actively being recruited by headhunters. Which did mean if this whole solar panel thing did flop, they’d still be, you know, employable. And, honestly, that wasn’t going to change. He could write code _and_ do high-level physics _and_ build all kinds of stuff. So could Jiya.

On the other hand, it made him question all over again if they’d made the right choice. He _wanted_ to say Connor had never steered him wrong, but. Um.

But he wanted to do something that _mattered_. He always had. And whatever else Connor had, he had an instinct for things that mattered.

Jiya came out of the bedroom, wearing his old blue flannel bathrobe, combing her hair out and looking like her shower had given her a jump on this whole relaxing thing. She smiled at him. “Hey.”

Rufus stared at her. He still wondered how the hell he’d gotten so damn lucky. “Hey,” he said softly.

She plopped down beside him on the couch, put her sock feet up on the coffee table, and picked up the stack of DVDs. “You got it queued up?”

“Uh, no.” He took the first Doctor Who Christmas special over to the DVD player. “One Carlin Christmas tradition, coming right up.”

“Kevin’s going to be sad he missed this.”

“Yeah, but we’re only going to be there like three days—”

“Rufus.” Her voice was sharp.

He turned. “What?”

“ _What,_ ” she picked a DVD out of the stack and held it by the corner with two fingers, “is _this?_ ”

 _Busted_. “… my bootleg copy of the Star Wars holiday special?”

“No.”

“The suffering is traditional. Like waiting for your presents.”

She looked at him. “… you _actually_ want to _watch_ this?” She sounded about two seconds from hauling him down to Sharp for a brain scan.

“I want to make fun of it and throw popcorn at the screen at the bad parts. C’mon, it’s like… think of it as a polar bear plunge. It’s really unpleasant but afterwards you get bragging rights.”

She looked at him. Tried not to smile.

He smiled back. “So, what do you say…”

“I say you’re a masochist.”

“But you’re gonna watch it.”

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll make the popcorn.”

#

Closing the front door behind her felt gratifyingly like shutting the world out.

Garcia’s sock feet were sticking over the end of the couch. When they moved, that couch was definitely coming with them.

He sat up and looked at her as she hung up her coat, pulled her heels off one at a time, and laid her bag and her festive earrings down on the counter. She still had some toiletries in the downstairs bathroom. When she came out from taking her makeup off, he had a steaming mug of tea waiting for her.

Mug in one hand and his hand in the other, she led him to the couch. When he sat at one end, she curled up on her side, head in his lap.

“Did not go well?” His fingers began to ease over her hair.

“It went about as well as Christmas dinner with a recently bereaved, angry, resentful teenager could.”

Ethan was nearly ninety. When what he wanted for Christmas was a meal with both his grandchildren, she hadn’t been willing to say no. He’d broken the news about her to Will Cahill; Christmas dinner was supposed to be a quiet, low-key family dinner for them to all spend some time together.

And Will wasn’t a bad kid, but he clearly resented having to share the memory of his dad with this half-sister he’d never known. Lucy wanted to laugh hysterically, because, as far as she was concerned, Will could have it all.

Garcia’s gentle, deliberate fingers began to find and remove her hairpins. “Not your fault, Lucy.”

“He’s fifteen,” she said softly. “I lost my dad when I was fifteen.”

She, at least, had had an explanation. Lung cancer was nasty, but straightforward. Will had no answers, and he _knew_ that.

“He didn’t know,” she added. “About Rittenhouse, yet.” Ethan telling her that, while they were waiting for Will, had been almost the evening’s only saving grace.

“So Cahill’s death saved him from indoctrination.”

“Yeah, but we can’t tell _him_ that.”

Garcia continued his unhurried search for her hairpins. “Still not your fault.”

She let go of a deep breath. Then she rolled on her back and looked up at him. “How are you?” she asked quietly.

Garcia had declined Ethan’s invitation. He’d also declined to join her at the Carlin house last night. Rufus and Jiya were up for just a few days, to spend Christmas with his family, so she and Denise, and Wyatt and Grace, had all come by for a while. They’d eaten cookies and played board games and judged terrible remakes of Christmas songs, while Grace slept in Mrs. Carlin’s spare bedroom. Wyatt left when she woke, saying there were limits to how much you could expect from a cranky four-month-old baby. Lucy, not liking the thought of Garcia spending Christmas Eve alone with his memories, had left soon after.

Denise, _bless_ her, had hosted Judith, Tom, and Pete, so Lucy and Garcia had had a quiet Christmas morning, just the two of them… and their ghosts. They’d exchanged gifts— both books— and for lunch, Lucy had tried her hand at the Preston family Christmas lasagna, while Garcia made one of his grandmother’s pasta dishes. Lucy couldn’t for the life of her pronounce it, but it had been delicious. The afternoon had been undemanding and perfect.

And then she’d gone to supper with Ethan and Will, leaving him alone again.

“I’m all right,” he told her.

She searched for the truth in the set of his mouth and eyes, and decided he was probably telling it. She was fairly certain that he’d been in tears last night, not long before she got home. But that… wasn’t surprising. They both had so much to grieve. As long as they had the time, the space, the peace, to do it… she thought they could carry on.

She reached across his lap to see what he’d been reading. “Nicholas of Myra.”

“Seemed appropriate.”

Lucy smiled. Then she sighed, levered herself to sitting, and reached for her mug, now cool enough to sip. He slid his arm around her, and she rested against his side. She’d gotten used to this— him being here, them being a them, all of it— delightfully quickly. It eased her heart to have him a fixture in her mother’s house. And he was, now.

Figuring out their living arrangements had been simple, for the most part. Garcia took over one end of the kitchen island for his own work. The job market for ex-cons who’d recently been on the Interpol watch list was, not surprisingly, poor; the few opportunities he’d been able to find had been so horrifying that he’d reported one of them to Denise, leading to the destruction of a human trafficking ring.

He kept looking. Lucy came downstairs one morning and found him looking at ads for construction workers.

“Are you,” she said, “kidding me?”

“It’s a job that needs muscle and they’re not picky.”

She closed his laptop, pulled out the chair around the corner from his, and stared at him. “You’d rather take a job as an underpaid, underused day laborer than let me support us?”

He opened his mouth.

She cut him off: “If our situations were reversed, and I couldn’t find work, and you told me not to worry about it and then you found me applying to an assembly line, what would you think?”

“I’d be, uh, seriously concerned for your wellbeing.” At her basilisk stare, he relented. “This isn’t just about my pride, Lucy. I’m not good at being idle.”

“I had noticed that you’d fixed nearly everything wrong with the house, yes.”

He didn’t bother looking sheepish.

“Garcia, you’d be wasted on a construction site.”

“There’s nothing wrong with working with your hands.”

“I agree. But your _brain_ would be wasted. Plus you’d be fired within two days for insubordination.”

“I _was_ a soldier, Lucy,” he pointed out, trying not to smile.

“You fought in a variety of loosely organized militias that couldn’t afford to kick people out for mouthing off.”

“Potato, potahto,” he muttered.

“ _Yes. That. That is exactly my point_.”

He closed his eyes, smiling.

“You speak like a hundred languages,” she added. “Isn’t there someone who finds that valuable enough not to care about your record?”

“The record that suggests I’m a terrorist?”

It was at that juncture that Denise came over for dinner, and asked if he’d be interested in doing contract work for Homeland Security.

Garcia put his fork down. “Doing,” he said, “what?”

“Decryption and forensic accounting.”

Garcia’s own basilisk stare intensified. “I don’t have to remind you, _Agent Christopher_ , what happened to the people I loved last time I did that kind of work for a three-letter agency.”

Denise was not cowed. “No,” she said calmly. “You don’t. And _I_ don’t have to remind you how far I am willing to go for my people. To _protect_ my people.”

They stared at each other. Garcia looked down first.

“Is this pity?” he demanded abruptly.

Denise snorted. “Flynn, the battles I had to fight to even be able to _offer_ you this position with my group? It sure as _hell_ is not pity.”

“Then what?”

“You have skills I can use.”

He continued to watch her.

“And,” she admitted, “I know that you won’t be poached by the NSA the moment you’re properly trained.”

Garcia’s face clearly indicated what he thought of ever working for the NSA again. “I’m not, uh, interested in helping the US government bring the heavy end of the hammer down on someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“It’s contract work,” Denise reminded him. “You could refuse any job you didn’t like.”

Garcia deliberately chewed, swallowed, and took a drink. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said. After a minute, he added: “I, uh.” He toyed with some spaghetti on his plate. “Appreciate the offer.”

He took it, which Lucy thought was the right choice. So he turned up to Denise’s office one day a week, and invariably came home in exactly the mood she expected from Garcia in an office full of Homeland Security agents.

That led to other, less sensitive jobs, that could be brought home, considering the house— all of them— were still under protective DHS surveillance. Which led to Garcia’s things slowly spreading out across the island.

That made her happy to see. And considering he also had several square feet of the side counter covered in his books and papers on the Yugoslav War, she did wonder if he didn’t have another job creeping up behind him… literally.

He took over a corner of the bedroom for a regimen of really impressive body weight exercises. Occasionally she happened to wander by as he was finishing up in the morning. Occasionally her appreciation of him, shirtless, sweaty, panting, agile, and very strong, led to sex, which left them _both_ sweaty, panting, and appreciative.

“It’s occurred to me,” she said, during one of these interludes, “that you could stand to be more…” Her face flushed. “Selfish.”

He looked up at her in disbelief. “You think I don’t enjoy our lovemaking?”

“I know you do.” Garcia did nothing by halves, and for him to turn his undivided attention to _her_ pleasure…

She made herself focus. “I just think you could stand to enjoy it even more.”

He slid his hands down her back to her ass. “Are you suggesting something, Lucy?”

“I’m suggesting…”

She looked down at him as she straddled his thighs. Oh, he was beautiful. His eyes, wide and dark; the chiseled lines of his face; the long, sturdy, elegant lines of his limbs, sprawled across the bed; the dark hair that ran down his pale torso; the jagged slashes and circles that were his history written into his skin.

“I’m suggesting,” she repeated, “that you…” Her face heated again. “Leave your hands on the headboard, and follow my lead.”

He licked his lips and stared up at her. Then he slowly stretched his arms above his head. That alone nearly tempted her beyond self-control—

She took a deep breath.

She’d start, she thought, by carefully and deliberately kissing each of the scars she could reach. Then she’d have him roll over, and do the same for the ones on that side of him. Then she’d have him turn over again and continue from there…

Sometimes they showered together afterwards. It was a good routine.

Less enjoyable was the night she woke to find him frantically checking her for bullet holes. Or the morning she woke at four to an empty bed and came downstairs to find him with her mother’s entire collection on the Third Reich stacked in front of him.

Next morning, she came downstairs to find the books put away and his feet draped over the arm of the couch. He sat up when he heard her coming. “Sometimes this is how it is, Lucy,” he told her, voice low and rough. “Can you live with that?”

It wasn’t _all right_. Nothing about what had happened last night, let alone 1944, was all right. But.

She went over and sat beside him on the couch. “I know exactly who you are,” she told him quietly. “I didn’t ask you to— come here, with me, out of ignorance. Or misunderstanding.”

He looked up at her, eyes wide and dark.

“I’ve seen you at your worst,” she added. “Haven’t I?”

He nodded slowly.

And he— he had seen her at her lowest.

Lucy came back to the present, to a fire gently crackling in the hearth, to Garcia supporting her.

“Your birthday,” she said after a while.

His arm tightened around her. “What about it?”

“January 6th.” She studied his profile. “What do you want to do?”

“Do?” He sounded baffled.

“Yes, Garcia.”

Was this too much? Was she pushing too hard? She’d had this worry before. The last thing she wanted was to trample all over his memories. But—

 _I want a life with you, Lucy_.

“Think about it,” she added.

“I’d like to see the city with you.”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“You’ve lived here your whole life, haven’t you? Almost?”

She nodded.

“I hadn’t spent much time here before all this. I’d like—” He hesitated. “You see things no one else does. You have the most refreshing perspective of anyone I know, Lucy. If… you’re willing, I’d like you to show me the city.”

She looked at him.

“— or… anything. Anything would be fine. Or nothing. It’s, uh.” He licked his lips. “Been a while.”

Well, she’d asked. And she might not understand how highly he valued her opinions, but if that’s what he wanted, for the first birthday he’d celebrate in three damn years, that’s what he’d get.

She leaned against him for a few more minutes, and finished her tea. “Are you going to think I’m hopelessly old if I give up and go to bed now?”

“Would you care if I did?”

She thought about this. “No.”

He smoothed her hair back. “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

She reached up, tilted his face towards her, and kissed him. “Merry Christmas, Garcia,” she whispered.

She felt him smile against her mouth. “Merry Christmas, Lucy.”

#

What was she supposed to keep?

Jettisoning her moral scruples to save the world? Nope. Unquestioning obedience of an ideology? She wasn’t sure she’d ever believe anything again.

But quickly checking out the apartment every time she came in, that was useful enough. Which was good, because it was also automatic.

Everything looked normal. Mom was sleeping on the couch, which meant Wyatt was around here somewhere. Kevin’s room was dark. They’d taught her stealth, too, and it was easy to move silently through the apartment—

She stopped in the doorway to her bedroom. Wyatt was sprawled on her bed, facing the bassinet, mouth slightly open, clearly fast asleep.

Exhausted as she was, she still smiled.

She was good at sneaking. She could’ve moved around without him noticing, probably could’ve gotten within two feet of him.

So, she didn’t.

She hesitated. He’d canceled on watching Grace twice last week, and then turned up with a fresh split lip, a mature black eye, and a limp. He hadn’t said anything at all, and she hadn’t asked; she knew he was fighting the dregs of Rittenhouse, and that it was a miracle he was allowed to contact her at all.

He’d also nearly fallen asleep in the mashed sweet potatoes on Christmas. So, all together, her keen sense of the obvious told her he’d been running pretty ragged.

She had a cot in the closet. She could set that up in the living room. She eased the door mostly shut behind her, and moved silently across the carpet so she didn’t disturb Mom, though Mom could sleep through most anything.

Behind her, Grace stirred, and so did Wyatt. Jessica turned, cot in hand, and watched him prop himself up on one elbow and glance towards the living room, then lean over the bassinet. “No Mom yet, huh?” he said quietly. He yawned. “What’d’you think happened to her?”

He picked Grace up. “How could she stay away from these chubby cheeks, huh?” he added. “Little Miss Chunkamonk and her ten tiny toes, coming soon to a crib near you.”

Grace babbled. Wyatt repeated it back to her as he bounced her, which was so adorable Jessica’s heart might have quietly exploded.

“Whatcha want?” Wyatt checked her diaper. “Guess it’s breakfast again, huh? That’s my growing girl.” He hoisted her. “Daddy’s favorite lady.” He smiled dopily down at her and gently booped her noise. Grace smiled back as they started for the door.

Wyatt saw Jessica’s purse near the door and spun.

She tried not to laugh at the look on his face. “Don’t let me interrupt the show.”

He looked grumpy. “How long’ve _you_ been there?”

“I just got home. Saw you sacked out on my bed, so I was gonna set this up—” She lifted the cot. “In the living room.”

“You weren’t even gonna check on her?”

“I figured you’d rather not wake to me standing over you, Wyatt.”

He looked disgruntled, maybe because he couldn’t argue.

“I would’ve gotten up with her when she fussed,” Jessica added. “Look, you’ve got a long drive home. Do you want the bed? Or the cot?”

“Uh… thanks, but I better, uh… Here, take her and I’ll make up the bottle.”

Jessica sat on the edge of the bed and tried to keep Grace quiet. The kid already had both parents up with her at three am; she didn’t need Gramma too.

Grace wanted to fuss. Wyatt frowned when he came back in to find Jess holding her away from her body. “What’re you doing?”

“I think she smells the booze on my clothes. Can you take her?”

So Wyatt fed Grace while Jessica got into her pajamas behind his back. Then she sat down beside them.

“How was work?” Wyatt asked absently.

“Fine.” She knew better than to ask _him_ that.

“She, uh… she laughed, earlier.”

Startled, Jessica smiled. “ _Did_ she?”

Wyatt nodded. “You haven’t seen that yet?”

She shook her head. “She seems to like you better than me.” Not the first time she’d thought that.

“I did look after her when she was little.”

“If that means she also likes _Garcia Flynn_ better than me…” Jessica muttered.

“Look, I didn’t have a choice. And I told you, you don’t get the criticize the parenting choices I made while you were working for a bunch of evil maniacs trying to run the world.”

Jessica snorted. “Bet _that’s_ never been said before in the history of co-parenting.”

Wyatt kind of smiled.

He looked up and studied her, his smile vanishing.

She raised her eyebrows.

“You okay, Jess?” he asked after a minute or two.

“I’m tired. I worked a double, and my barback bailed.”

“It’s more than that, though.”

He did know her well… somehow. And Delta Force Wyatt was never far from the surface these days. She honestly preferred his open suspicion to the secret doubts he’d been harboring in the bunker. But…

But, nothing. She’d earned his distrust, and if she hadn’t realized how much his trust did mean to her until she’d lost it, that was her own damn problem. She was free to rebuild her life and raise her daughter, which was more than she’d dared dream. And she dreaded Grace one day learning not to trust her, either, but… maybe she should borrow trouble a bit closer to home.

“Rittenhouse, Wyatt,” she said tiredly. “Which you don’t want to hear about, so, now you know.”

He stiffened. “Has someone contacted you?”

Definitely Delta Force Wyatt, now, for all that he was carefully feeding their daughter.

“No, Wyatt.” It came out as a sigh. “I would’ve told Agent Christopher if they had.”

“Then what do you mean?”

She paused. “They taught me a lot,” she said, slow and weary. “Is that evil ‘cause of where I got it from? How do I tell? Some of it’s just… tools, and then the rest I think, I would never use any of _that_ … except to protect _her_. And _then_ I think, that’s how they get you.” She glanced at him, and clarified: “Family. Rittenhouse—”

“I know.”

They sat there for a minute. At least he wasn’t staring at her like an interrogation suspect any more.

“I don’t know who I am any more, Wyatt,” she continued, because— what was the worst he was going to do? Tell his superiors? Look at her with contempt?

Honesty— she was discovering honesty took so little effort, maybe because the consequences were so much less than anything Rittenhouse could’ve done to her. And it was _addictive_.

“I know how to tend bar. I know how to be a secret agent. I’m done with the second one, and I don’t wanna do the first one for the rest of my life.”

“What do you want, Jess?”

The question took her by surprise. She looked down to cover her reaction. How long had it been since anyone asked her that?

She cleared her throat. “These doubles—”

“You need more money for her?”

“No. You’re doing your share, Wyatt.” Timewise and moneywise. “These doubles, I wanna build up a cushion, I was thinking… maybe when she gets older…” She shrugged. “I thought I might try, you know, college.”

That was one reason. She was also kinda neurotic about having a financial cushion. Ever since those days of an empty fridge when Kevin was sick…

“Yeah?”

“Be the first Cody in… forever, I think.”

“Pretty sure you’d be the first Logan, too.”

Jessica shrugged. “Of course, not like being the first means anything other than a nice feeling.”

Wyatt snorted. “Don’t let Lucy hear you say that.”

“How is Lucy?” Jessica asked casually after a minute.

“She’s… good. She’s, uh, teaching again.”

“You said she and Flynn are a thing now?” Jessica watched him sideways.

“Well, he moved in with her.”

Jessica continued to eye him. “How do you feel about that?”

Wyatt gave her a sideways look, then was quiet for a while. Her heart sank.

“He makes her happy,” he said finally. “It’s… nice to see her happy.”

Of course. _Of course_ Wyatt would be in love with Lucy, a woman who’d never betrayed him, a woman who’d never held him at gunpoint. Jessica had made her damn bed and she would fucking lie in it.

 _Snap out of it_. She looked at Grace. “Looks like she’s done. Leave the bottle, I’ll wash up.”

Wyatt tucked Grace into her bassinet with a warm little smile that melted Jessica’s insides at the same time it filled her with a deep sadness. Those first weeks and months after Grace’s birth, Jessica could never be a part of that. No matter what she did now.

All she could do now was… better.

“Hey, uh, don’t take this the wrong way,” she added, “but… don’t come back ’til you’ve slept in your own bed more than one night, ‘kay?”

Wyatt looked surprised, and a little hurt.

“I’m _not_ trying to keep her away from you,” Jessica said. “If you want to see her, I’ll bring her up to you.” That would mean a long trip across the city in hours she’d rather be sleeping, but she’d _do_ it. “But you’re exhausted. You don’t need to be dragging yourself down here every night.”

“She’s my kid, Jess.”

“I know—”

“It’s my job to take care of her. I’m not gonna cop out.”

“I _know_. But you looking after her while I work was supposed to be a once-in-a-while thing so _you_ could see her. If you can’t make it, that’s why Mom’s _here_.”

“Your mom doesn’t need to be getting up at three am with a baby.”

“Neither do you ’til you’ve gotten more sleep.”

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” he muttered.

She snorted. “You do that.”

She walked him to the front door, because knowing for sure it was locked was another thing that came automatically. A lock wouldn’t stop a determined intruder but there was no point in inviting trouble.

Then she stepped out behind him. “Hey, Wyatt?”

He turned, and covered a yawn.

She hesitated again. “Don’t you ever let anyone tell her who she should be.”

His gaze snapped into focus, serious and searching. “I won’t,” he said quietly. “I promise, Jess.”

He started to reach for her, for Grace. Then he dropped his hand, kind of shook his head, and walked away.

#

Wyatt yawned widely. When he could close his mouth again, he took a long drink of coffee.

He wanted to blame it on the fact that he was meeting Lucy for breakfast and not lunch or dinner, but he’d woken up New Year’s Day on Lucy’s couch— after passing out from exhaustion, not booze. And he’d spent most of Christmas fast asleep on the Cody couch. So, probably safe to say he wouldn’t’ve been any better another time of day.

Crashing on Lucy’s couch had led to an awkward little conversation with Flynn, while Lucy was still upstairs. Okay, so it was Wyatt’s fault for trying to fill the silence, as they both sat with coffee, by asking about New Year’s resolutions, but he hadn’t been _serious_. He certainly hadn’t expected Flynn to come back with _not have to kill anyone_.

All Wyatt really cared about, this year, was being a good dad. He’d had the sense not to say _that_.

He yawned again. Maybe he was getting older. Or maybe adding an infant to the mix just made everything ten times more tiring. Maybe he was being an idiot for being remotely surprised that co-parenting— even if Jessica and Marian and Kevin were doing the bulk of the work— while leading an elite strike force hunting down a creepy megalomaniacal cult, was exhausting.

Hunting down Rittenhouse, though. That was going well. Except _that_ meant—

He looked up as the door opened and Lucy came in. He waved off her rushed apology for being late, and waited as she dumped bag and coat on the booth beside her.

She took a long drink of the coffee that was waiting for her. “Thank you,” she said fervently. “Sorry. Peter called last night with a job situation, and I went out to meet him, and then someone broke into where Judith is staying, so she’s on our couch now, and I just— didn’t sleep very well.”

“Nightmare?” he guessed, from the dark circles under her eyes.

She nodded.

The waiter came and took their orders. When he was gone, Wyatt asked, “Anything you wanna talk about?”

Lucy shook her head. “It’s never anything original,” she said after a minute. “Amy dies. You die. Rufus dies. Jiya dies. Garcia dies. Or— I see my mother, and she’s the woman I remember again, and then Rittenhouse kills her and I can’t save her. Just like I can’t save any of you. Or— I am Rittenhouse.” She shrugged. “Not original, but it’s enough.”

Terrors didn’t have to be original to wake you, heart pounding, and steal your sleep. “I wish I could tell you they go away.”

She shrugged again. “I always wake up.” She tried for a smile, and maybe earned a participation trophy. “That’s enough, right?”

Because for months, they’d lived a never-ending nightmare.

“What about you?” she added. “You look exhausted.”

He made a non-committal noise. “Saving the world by day, raising a kid by night, you know how it is.”

“How are the raids?”

“Uh… it’s going well. Hit two more targets. Agent Christopher’s people’ve been analyzing, uh, financials and stuff, and she thinks we’ve cleaned them out of the Bay Area.”

“That’s… that’s great.” Lucy thought about that a bit, and relaxed a little.

“So I’m… getting sent back to Pendleton. They, uh… think things’ll be easier to run like that.” He thought that was total bullshit, and there was a good chance he’d be back up here within the month, but it wasn’t his call.

He’d asked Agent Christopher if this was an attempt to derail their mission. She’d made a face, and said, no, it was politics. Which, again, total bullshit, but not treachery.

Man, that was a low bar.

Lucy looked at him, startled and dismayed. “When?”

“Next week.”

“… oh.”

They were quiet.

“What about Grace?”

Wyatt winced. “Staying with Jessica. I’ll see her as much as I can…”

He hated this, he really did. It wasn’t enough for him to just see Grace between raids, between assignments. He missed her as it was. He didn’t want to just be the dad who came by occasionally to see how much his baby had grown while he was away.

But he couldn’t leave Rittenhouse free in the world, either.

“I can’t look after her on my own. Not with work. Not when I could be called away at any time.”

And he couldn’t ask Jessica to move to San Diego. Not when she was finally settling down with her family. Marian would go back to Texas eventually, but Kevin was pretty settled in Hayward again. And Miguel was there, who seemed like a nice guy.

Kevin had definitely been shocked to discover Wyatt didn’t know him at all. He seemed like a good guy, too, if kinda spacey, and Wyatt thought they probably could’ve become friends again, if they’d had the chance. Which now they wouldn’t.

“You’ll just have to come back here and see her often, then.”

Wyatt nodded. “Might drop in to see you every so often, too.”

She gave him her best unamused schoolmarm look. “You’d better.”

After a few minutes their food came. “You’ll have Rufus and Jiya there,” Lucy pointed out.

He nodded. And his Delta buddies. He was planning to crash on Bam-Bam’s— sorry, _Dave’s_ — couch for a night or two while he found his own place.

And at least Lucy wouldn’t be totally alone here. He really didn’t like the thought of her trying to, you know, move on, start again, with only Flynn for company, but at least she _had_ Flynn. He couldn’t believe he was thinking that, but it was true.

He’d had the unwelcome thought, more than once, that if their positions had been reversed— he and Lucy together, with Flynn hanging around as a friend— he might’ve been a lot less happy about Lucy going off for breakfast with Flynn once or twice a week, than Flynn appeared to be about the actual situation. That inspired a surly, grudging gratitude, so he just tried not to think about it much.

“How’s, uh, everything else?” he asked, after a few minutes of quiet. “Getting ready for the semester, and everything?”

“Mm.” She put down her coffee cup. “I mean honestly I mostly spent up until Christmas recovering from the end of the quarter. Which is… great, because the winter quarter starts Monday.”

“Oh.” He took a bite. “What are you teaching?”

“American History 1, and a grad seminar on colonialism.” She looked tired. “Plus working on a plan for another book, because I need something to fill this hole in my CV. _Plus_ —” Her hand tightened on her fork. “My tenure case is up for review. Again. I mean it’s out of my hands at this point, but…” She shook her head. “What if I fail? Last time, maybe it was Rittenhouse, I’ll never know, but _this_ time— it would be all on me—”

“If they don’t give you tenure then they’re idiots you don’t need,” Wyatt said. “Find another school.”

“And start over? Wyatt, that’s six, seven more years of my life. I’d be forty.”

“ _Dr. Preston_ ,” he said pointedly, “listen. Your work is damned impressive. _You_ are damned impressive. And if you have to get tenure at forty, that’s not gonna change either of those things, all right?”

She gave him a look that might’ve said he wasn’t qualified to judge her work, which, sure, but, c’mon. He also wasn’t _wrong_. “… thank you.”

She took another bite. “ _Plus,_ trying to get the house in order to put it on the market.”

Geez, he was surprised she wasn’t more of a nervous wreck than she was, with all this on her plate. The Lucy he’d met way back at the beginning would’ve been. “Your childhood home? You sure you want to sell that?”

“All my memories were lies, Wyatt.”

He shook his head. “They happened to you,” he told her. “It was real, once. That’s not lies. Amy wasn’t a lie.”

She looked even more tired. “My mom…”

“Look, you’re never gonna know about your mom in the old timeline. One day… you’re gonna have to let that go.”

She hid her face in her hands.

“… Lucy? Hey.”

“I’m not crying,” she said. “It’s just— do you ever wish things were simple?”

He snorted. He was afraid if he started laughing, he wouldn’t stop, and he wasn’t really the kind of guy to break down hysterically in a diner, even when chronically exhausted. “Yeah.”

She put her hands down. “Yeah,” she echoed, looking bleak.

They didn’t say much the rest of the meal. “Hey,” he told her, as they both paid. “Look after yourself.”

She looked at him. “I’m not the one running around after Rittenhouse.”

“Not what I meant, and you know it.”

She looked down. “I’m working on it,” she said finally. “I can’t say every day is a little better, but… there’s a definite upward trend.”

“You know you can call any time. If I’m working, I’ll call back as soon as I can.” She absolutely, positively _should_ know that, but he knew how Lucy got, so it was worth saying out loud. Repeatedly.

She nodded. “You, too. And tell Jessica if she needs anything— tell _Kevin_ if they need anything—”

“I will.” That eased a little of the knot in his chest, because he knew Lucy would do her best to move heaven and earth for Grace if she had to, and he knew just how damned impressive Lucy’s best _was_. “Thanks.”

“Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into her bag and handed him something. His handkerchief, from the funeral. “Thanks. For… for all of it.”

They stood in front of the diner. “Maybe I’ll come down to see you guys,” she said. “I’m teaching five days a week again, but… spring break, maybe.”

“Spring break in San Diego? Bet your students would approve.”

She rolled her eyes at him, then pulled him in for a hug. “I’ll see you later, Wyatt.”

He swallowed. Yeah. But later, this time, would be a lot later.

#

Jiya sat on the edge of the bed and watched Rufus pack.

He glanced up at her, then went back to folding underwear and looking for his lucky Chewbacca dress socks.

“You’ll let me know when you get there?” She hated how nagging it sounded.

“Yeah.”

She hesitated. “I wish you weren’t going alone.”

“I’m not going alone. I’m going with Connor.”

“Right,” Jiya said. “The man who took Rittenhouse’s money to build a time machine. No idea why _that_ doesn’t make me feel better.”

She knew what it really was: he was going without _her_.

She hadn’t forgotten her vision of them growing old together. But things changed all the time. Their choices, someone else’s choices…

Rufus looked up. “I’ll be fine, Jiya,” he said gently. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. It’s a two-day conference in Las Vegas, we go, Connor gives a talk, I’m on hand to answer technical questions, we come home.”

“You don’t _know_ that—”

“Okay, fine. You’re right. But what do you want me to do? Never go outside again? Die inside when mecha-Godzilla ravages San Diego?”

“Rufus.”

He looked a little abashed. After a minute, he said, “You have to let me out of your sight sometime.”

The fact that he _got_ it unreasonably pissed her off. “So you can do stupid things like charge into danger again? Get yourself killed again?”

He put his socks down and came around the bed to take her hands. “Do you _want_ me to be the kind of person who sits back and watches other people get hurt?”

“Sometimes, I do!”

He stared at her, his eyebrows pulled together in confusion or…

Oh, God.

When he opened his mouth, she braced for him to tell her—

“Jiya… I think you should see someone,” he said quietly.

Wait. What?

“What kind of someone?”

“A counselor.”

“Rufus—”

“We talked about this in Nebraska, remember?”

“Yeah, and then the war ended. I’m fine.”

She hated him for clearly not being convinced.

“You reflexively put yourself between me and any danger you think is out there,” he said gently. “It’s kind of heartbreaking, actually. You’re always afraid something is going to happen to me—”

“Because I _held you_ as you bled out,” she snapped, “which I can’t exactly tell a shrink.”

“Maybe Agent Christopher could find one—”

She shot to her feet, pulling her hands out of his. “I’m not crazy, Rufus! Okay?!”

“No, you’re _not_ , but you’ve been through something traumatic!”

“I’m _fine_. I learned how to be tough, Rufus. I didn’t have any choice.”

He looked at her. “Jiya—”

“I’m not gonna end up like Stanley!” Her voice cracked.

“… who’s Stanley?”

She turned away. “Never mind.”

“No, definitely mind. Who’s Stanley?”

“It’s not important. Look, you’re gonna be late if you don’t—”

Rufus’s phone buzzed. She turned and read the message upside down. “Connor’s downstairs.”

“ _Damn_ it,” he muttered. He stuffed the rest of his things in his bag and zipped it shut as she watched. Then he came to her again.

She stared back at him, arms around herself, suddenly resentful of being vulnerable if this was what he was gonna do with it.

But this— but it could _always_ be the last time. She stepped forward and grabbed him, kissing him fiercely. She didn’t want to let him _go_.

Finally, his mouth and hands gentled, and then he stepped back. His eyes were wide and sad. “I love you, Jiya,” he said. “I just want you to be okay.”

She looked at him. “I— I love you,” she blurted. “I do.”

He opened his mouth. His phone buzzed again. He shook his head. Then he gave her a tentative cocky grin. “I know.”

Jiya rolled her eyes. “I’ll see you in two days, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking…”

Rufus gave her another quick kiss, grabbed his bag, and grabbed his computer bag from the dining room table on the way out.

She spent the day alone at work; Connor had a new engineer starting next week, but right now, it was just the three of them. Rufus texted her around midday to let her know they’d arrived and were on their way to the hotel. Her fingers tightened around the phone; she wrote back, _thanks_.

She ran simulations and compiled results and wrote a little program to speed up their workflow by 17%, but still went home unsatisfied. The apartment seemed empty. She couldn’t helped worrying, and she _hated_ being that person. She was tough. She was resilient.

She was… terrified.

Wyatt came for dinner. He’d become a regular since moving down a few weeks ago, and usually, it was good to see him. Tonight, she was pissed off and on edge, and wished they hadn’t agreed that he would come even with Rufus gone.

He could pretty obviously tell something was wrong, but he didn’t comment as they ate pizza in near-silence. “How’s Grace?” Jiya finally asked.

He smiled, but it looked like his heart wasn’t in it. Jiya was afraid until he said, “She’s good. Starting to pull herself up on things, apparently.”

Jiya had no idea at what age that was normal, but he said it like it was a good thing.

“I’m hoping to… see her next weekend, maybe.” His casual tone didn’t disguise his longing.

“Mmm.”

Her phone buzzed. She grabbed for it. Rufus had sent her a picture of the exhibition hall, with the message, _just usual conference stuff so far_.

She swallowed.

“… you okay?” Wyatt finally asked.

She nearly snapped at him. Then she shut her mouth. “Did that shrink help?” she blurted.

He winced. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Helped me get my head out of my ass, but… that’s probably not your problem.”

She looked down. Hesitated.

“… do you worry about Grace? When you’re not around?”

“Always.” His voice was low and tense.

“Does that—” She looked up again. “Does that bother you?”

“That she’s not here?”

“That you worry about her.”

“… are we talking about Grace or Rufus?”

“Never mind,” she snapped.

An awkward silence.

“I talked to the shrink after melting down in front of the whole team,” Wyatt reminded her. “Don’t have any room to judge.”

“I’m _fine_.”

“… sure.”

Wyatt went home. Jiya went to bed. Alone, for almost the first time since getting Rufus back. She rolled over, tried to get comfortable, and buried her face in Rufus’s pillow.

She fell asleep and dreamed disjointedly. She got up and checked her phone. She tried to sleep some more. Eventually she went into the living room and put on season one of new Who. The show took just enough of her brainpower to distract her, and she dozed in front of the TV.

She woke up, turned off the TV, and spent the rest of the night on the couch. She was alone again in the office that day. She made a bunch of stupid mistakes and swore at herself. Damn it, she couldn’t keep going like this.

She took a break and browsed a list of local shrinks, but none of them took her insurance, naturally. And besides— she called Denise, but got no answer.

Denise called back that night, when Jiya was sitting in a very quiet apartment, trying to read a paper. “Hello?”

“Hi, Jiya. Is everything okay?”

“Oh— yeah, um—” In the background, someone was practicing the piano, and Jiya felt bad for interrupting Denise’s family time. “I just— I just, um— I remember you telling us we couldn’t talk about anything under pain of treason, and… I was wondering— how to, um, find a…”

“Find a what?” Denise finally asked.

Jiya sighed. “Findatherapist.”

A long silence. “The person Wyatt talked to is actually in San Diego once a month,” Denise said. “Would you like me to talk to her?”

Jiya felt a rush of fear and relief. “Yeah— please.”

“All right.”

“And, um, paying…”

“Don’t worry about that. Homeland Security has a vested interest in keeping our secrets close to the vest.” Denise sounded wry. Then she paused. “How are you?”

They talked for a few minutes. Jiya _really_ didn’t want to go into more detail than she had already, so she just told a story or two from work. She asked about Denise’s family. It sounded like they were slowly recovering from the stress of the war.

Though from the outside, you could never really tell, could you?

She didn’t sleep any better that night. By the time she got through the next day, she was practically a zombie. She headed home.

Her shoulders slumped in relief when she opened the door and saw Rufus sitting at the dining room table.

His smile was a little tentative as he came to meet her. She put her bag down, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him, relaxing at the feel of his body against hers, his lips gentle on hers.

He pulled back. “Hey,” he said quietly.

She exhaled. “Hey.”

He’d picked up dinner on the way home. They skipped the table in favor of the couch. She wasn’t hungry, honestly; she just wanted to lean against him.

When they’d put the empty containers on the floor, and she had her head tucked under his chin, he murmured, “So, I asked Connor who Stanley was.”

She stiffened.

“He… told me about Stanley Fisher. The guy you went to meet the day…”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not gonna end up like him, Jiya.”

“You don’t—”

“I do know that. Do you even… _like_ your visions?”

 _Like?_ She wasn’t sure that word applied. “They’re… useful. Or, they were.”

“And you haven’t looked at them since…”

“No.”

“Jiya, he was hospitalized because he wouldn’t, couldn’t, stay out of the time stream in his head. Or whatever. That’s… not you.” His arm tightened around her.

She sighed. “I have a therapist appointment in three weeks.”

“That’s—”

“I _really_ don’t want to go.” But she had three weeks to… whatever.

She felt his lips against her hair. “I’m glad you made the appointment,” he said quietly. “I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

She made a grumpy noise.

After a while, he yawned. “Bed?”

“I call little spoon.”

“Mmm, fine with me.”

#

She jolted awake in horror. She was— she’d become—

Someone was screaming.

“Lucy. Lucy, _Lucy_ —”

Her eyes snapped open. Flynn. If Flynn were here then it would be all right. He’d kill her if he had to, and the nightmare would be over—

“Lucy. Lucy!”

She trailed off with a few ragged cries. As she panted, as he stared down at her, his open concern brought all her memories tumbling back to her. The war was over. Rittenhouse was in its death throes. Garcia was here with her.

The horror of the dream, in all its terrifying plausibility, lingered. She gagged at the memory of it, and started to slide off the bed towards the trash can before she got herself under control. She gasped.

“Lucy.” They were both sitting up. He took her very carefully by the shoulders. “Lucy. It’s all right.”

Pounding footsteps up the stairs— the door flew open and bounced off the wall—

Even as Lucy turned, Garcia bodily hauled her across the bed to put her behind him—

Judith stood in the doorway, meat cleaver in one hand, big heavy frying pan in the other. She looked around the room. “Are you okay?” she demanded.

“She had a bad dream,” Garcia said, as Lucy fumbled for words.

Judith looked at Lucy, who managed to nod.

“… all right.” She reached for the door and began to close it much more gently than she’d opened it. “Sorry— sorry…”

As Judith’s footsteps receded, Lucy struggled with this second shock. She shook her head. Judith— their couch— because—

Garcia turned and drew her, gently, against his chest. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “It’s, uh, twenty eighteen,” he told her. “We’re in San Francisco. Do you remember?”

“San Francisco,” she repeated raggedly. “Twenty eighteen. What happened last year?”

He took his time wrapping one arm around her, spreading his hand across her back. “Well, I started the year in prison, you in Rittenhouse—”

She flinched.

“— skipping ahead, sometime in October, you, ah, shish kebabed Emma on a hillside in northern California, and most of the rest of her people surrendered after that.”

“You shot her,” Lucy whispered.

“Trust me, Lucy, I just sped up the inevitable.” He gently stroked her back.

“I dreamt I never got out,” she whispered, her voice cracking.

It hadn’t happened that way. But it _could_ have. Her, playing the part better and better, until—

“You did get out. Wyatt and Rufus came for you.”

“But if they hadn’t—”

“If they hadn’t, we both know you would have gone down fighting. That almost happened anyway, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard Rufus and Jiya talking about your encounter with Emma in 1918. They were worried about you, I think.”

Lucy nodded mutely. Emma had certainly been convinced Lucy would never join them.

But Emma had also fatally underestimated Lucy’s strength.

She leaned against Garcia and let him comfort her. She didn’t tell him about her first, relieved thought when she’d woken and seen him. Why make trouble?

“Talk to me?” she whispered after a while.

“About what?”

“Anything. Anything… happy,” she amended, which did narrow it down quite a bit. She just wanted his voice.

He was quiet for a moment, and she worried she’d asked too hard a thing. Then he began, “I went to live with my grandmother when I was five…”

He made it sound idyllic, boyhood in a small Croatian village in the mountains. But she knew he’d gone there after his mother’s death… because, for some reason, someone thought the young Garcia was better off out of Asher Flynn’s orbit.

And yet, she thought his stories were honest.

At some point she toppled over sideways, bringing him with her. She drifted off to sleep against his chest, his voice rumbling against her ear, something about sprouting grain and candles and…

She usually woke alone. This morning, she had Garcia’s arm around her waist, exactly as she’d fallen asleep. She stayed still, hoping not to disturb him. It took her a few minutes to realize he was already awake.

She pulled back, looked at him, and sighed. “Hey.”

He gently tucked her hair behind her ear. “Hi.”

“I’m sorry I gave you such a rude awakening last night.”

“Don’t apologize, Lucy.” He looked aggrieved, as if he’d said it a dozen times.

Which he might have.

She leaned up and kissed him. “I’m… glad you’re here,” she said quietly. She’d be glad he was there even if they really were platonic roommates. He was… he was indispensable.

She made it downstairs eventually, showered and dressed. Garcia handed her a cup of coffee. Judith was sitting at the island, too, drinking what was probably hot chocolate. She waited until Lucy got a couple of swallows of caffeine down to say, “I’m sorry about last night.”

Lucy blinked at her. “You meant well.”

More coffee. She considered her young houseguest further. “Judith, it’s ridiculous to have you still on the couch when there are three unoccupied bedrooms upstairs.”

Judith looked uncomfortable. “I thought… this would just be for a night or two.”

“Well, it’s not.” DHS was having trouble finding another place to put her. “Which is fine.” Honestly, Lucy kind of liked the company. She and Garcia tended to rattle around in the big house. “But since you _are_ here, why don’t you take my mom’s old room? There’s a lot more privacy than down here.”

“I don’t want to—”

“You’d practically be doing me a favor by exorcising it.”

“Oh… um, all right.”

“I’m not trying to kick you out of downstairs,” Lucy added. “You can leave your books and stuff wherever’s best.” Judith had gotten her GED and promptly enrolled in her first-ever college classes at the nearest community college. “But you’re welcome to that room.”

Judith tried a tentative smile. “Thank you.”

Judith finished her cocoa and disappeared into the library. As Garcia read the news on his laptop, Lucy, still groggy from the night before, nursed a second cup of coffee until she felt equal to food.

Eventually she cracked open her own laptop. She waded through a shallow sea of student emails first, then dove back into her notes on labor in the labor movement.

“I won’t be home for dinner tonight,” she reminded him absently a while later.

“Right, Ethan.”

She usually had dinner with her grandfather once a week, and just recently she’d started going to church with him on Sunday morning and then staying for lunch. It was a lot of time to spend together, but they had a lot of lost time to make up for. She enjoyed it very much. Ethan had a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and a lifetime of observations and conclusions on current and past events to share.

Besides… he was nearly ninety. Lucy wasn’t going to take any time with him for granted.

… she had an email from the provost.

She swallowed. Her hand clenched on the laptop.

She took a deep breath. In her peripheral vision, Garcia looked up.

She opened the message.

 _Dear Dr. Preston_ —

She skimmed.

 _Pleased— promotion— associate professor_ —

She read that again, gasped in relief, and slumped. She propped her head up in her hands.

She heard and felt Garcia behind her, reading over her shoulder. “Well done, Lucy.” The smile in his voice was audible.

“Thanks,” she managed. She—

It took her a minute or two to shake off her stupor. She laughed. “Oh my God, I actually did it.” She stood, ran her hands through her hair, turned, started to pace, and bent over the laptop to read that email again.

She’d _done_ it. No more bending over backwards to please her tenure committee, no more constantly worrying about being too outspoken, no more wondering if a new research direction would be too radical or not radical enough, no more fretting about the perception that she spent too much time on her teaching… she was off the professional tenterhooks.

She— she had to get ready to go to campus, and— and tonight, she’d tell the team, maybe, when everyone would be home and she had a minute to write something thoughtful and coherent and— right, she needed to get her stuff, traffic— this time of day—

She grabbed her phone and texted them, _I GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

She put the phone down, aware she was grinning so broadly her face would hurt in a minute, aware of Garcia’s warm, proud expression—

Her phone buzzed. It was Rufus. “Hello?”

“Lucy, that’s _awesome_ , congratulations!”

“I’m glad they finally pulled their heads out of their asses,” Jiya added, echoing like they were on speaker.

Lucy laughed. “Thanks, guys.”

“Congratulations, Doctor Preston!” Connor called in the background.

“Thanks. Thank you. Yeah, I… um.” That had been going somewhere at the beginning. She was too dazed and happy to remember where. “How’s work?”

Rufus groaned. Jiya made a disgusted noise. “Wanna switch?” she asked.

“Depends, do you want to go talk about colonialism for three hours?”

Jiya scoffed. “Hell, no.”

Lucy snorted.

“Hey,” Rufus said. “When are we doing your birthday?”

“When can you guys—”

“Because before too long this thing is going to be too big for our apartment.”

“… _what?_ ”

“Rufus, you weren’t supposed to _tell_ her,” Jiya hissed.

“Oops. Sorry.”

Lucy rolled her eyes, and couldn’t help laughing again. “I know it makes more sense for Garcia and I to come down there because it’s only two of us, but—”

“Oh, good, it’s definitely too big for the Prius.”

“… and how were you imagining I would get this hypothetical, horrifying present _home?_ ”

“Oh,” he said. “Um.”

They were ridiculous, and Lucy missed them.

“What happened?” Judith had come in in the middle of the conversation.

“Lucy got tenure,” Garcia told her.

“What does that mean?”

“Uh, it means Stanford recognized that her work is very good, and now it’s much harder for her to lose her job.”

“… was that a surprise?”

“Not to any objective observer of her work,” Garcia said.

Lucy looked at him. Like he had any idea about being an _objective observer_ of her work—

He smirked at her, and then Rufus got her attention again. They talked another few minutes before she hung up to get ready to teach.

Wyatt called just as she left for dinner. “Hello?” She juggled bag and phone so she could lock her office.

“Tenure, huh? I told you so.”

“Thank you, I appreciate your congratulations.”

He snorted. “Congratulations, Lucy.”

“Thanks. How are you?”

“Not chasing a bunch of megalomaniacal dicks through time, so, anything else is an improvement, right?”

“That good, huh?” At least he only sounded irritated and tired, not exhausted or pained.

Wyatt sighed. “I miss my kid,” he admitted quietly. “She’s getting so big, so fast.”

“I’m sorry, Wyatt. I know it’s rough.”

“Thanks.”

At dinner, Lucy got the pleasure of telling Ethan.

“I’m proud of you, Lucy,” he said, smiling. “Not surprised, but I am proud.”

Lucy had given up trying to explain the vagaries of tenure to anyone but Garcia. “Thanks.” She took another bite. “I can’t help wondering what Mom would’ve said,” she added finally.

Ethan studied his water glass for a moment. “I imagine she would’ve been proud as well.”

“Probably both in my own right, and in my right as a future Rittenhouse agent.”

“Probably.”

How much of her curiosity was true curiosity, and how much was a secret desire to show Mom she was finally good enough?

“And how is the man who says your name like a complete sentence?” Ethan asked after a few minutes.

Lucy smiled, feeling the contentment sink deep into her heart. “He’s doing well. He’s, uh, working on some kind of project on the Yugoslav Wars. He outstripped our library; I’ve been bringing him things from Stanford and from interlibrary loan.”

“He fought in one of those, yes?”

“Three. Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo.”

“Ah.”

“How’s Will?” she asked after a few minutes.

“He’s… topsy turvy, I think.” Ethan gave her a speculative glance, but didn’t say anything more. “Tell me the latest in the saga of escaping ridiculous departmental demands.”

Lucy got back late. She found Garcia in the library. His laptop showed some complicated financial spreadsheet… and instead, he was poring over a printed article.

He looked up, and scooted back. She sat sideways on his lap. He wrapped his arm around her back and tucked his hand against her hip. She slid her fingers through those of his other hand, and raised his hand to her lips. He exhaled slowly.

She was discovering just how wonderful it was to come home to him, over and over.

After a minute or two, she asked, “Do you have strong feelings on Valentine’s Day? I don’t care either—”

He stiffened, his ease vanishing, his face hardening into deep lines.

“Garcia?”

He rubbed his hand over his face. “It’s, uh, not fair to you…”

She felt the familiar sinking fear, and wondered, again, _is this it_. Was this when he left in search of something better? She _knew_ that was irrational, knew that was thanks to a lifetime of Mom’s— well. And, yes, a little thanks to Wyatt, though he’d just been thoughtless, not… deliberately manipulative.

She knew that was irrational. But.

“… it’s not fair to you either way,” he muttered.

“Garcia.”

“The sixteenth… was our wedding anniversary.”

… oh.

“Nothing to do with, uh,” he added. “Valentine’s Day.”

Her first impulse was to slide off his lap; she always instinctively retreated from the ghost of Lorena Flynn, not out of… well, yes, maybe a little out of fear of being second best. But mostly out of _respect_.

But his hand was still quite firm on her hip, and she followed her second impulse, to very carefully smooth his hair— getting a bit long— out of his face. “What do you need?” she asked quietly.

He looked startled, like he hadn’t even considered that.

“Do you— need to go away? Do you need _me_ to—”

His hand tightened further. “That’s the last thing I want.” It came out rough.

He looked up. Her own half-second of surprise must’ve been visible before it faded into a feeling of being deeply moved.

“Lucy,” he added, and swallowed. “Ghosts, and baggage, and God knows what else… I’m here with _you_.”

“I know,” she whispered. She leaned in and kissed his forehead. “I know.”

“Uh, Wednesday,” he said after a minute, with an air of collecting himself.

Her surprise returned; she would’ve thought this entire conversation was his answer. “I only asked to be sure we understood each other. It’s fine with me if we treat it like any other Wednesday.”

He looked up. “Really?”

She nodded.

“… all right.”

They were quiet for a few moments.

“I, ah, once made the mistake of bringing Lorena something, uh, fairly abbreviated for Valentine’s Day. Once,” he added.

“Was she… upset?”

He shook his head. “Modeled it for me, in fact.”

“… oh?” Lucy eyed him rather warily.

“And then asked me to model it for her.”

Lucy burst out laughing, and found it hard to stop as the pain in his expression eased into amusement. She wiped her eyes. “Did you?”

He shrugged noncommittally. Lucy laughed all over again.

She looked down at the article in front of him, and touched the first page. “Have you considered writing a book?”

“On the wars?”

She nodded.

He hesitated. “It had crossed my mind to try to correct the record somehow, but… I’m not the expert here.”

Lucy thought about the books sitting out on the counter. “You’re more of an expert than some of those authors.”

“I don’t know anything about writing a book.”

“I do.”

He looked up at her.

“Just something to think about.” She kissed his hair. “Is Judith home?”

“Yeah, she’s upstairs.”

Good. It was late, and Lucy would’ve worried. Maybe she was being a little overprotective— but Judith was eighteen, and while she’d acclimated to the twenty-first century pretty well, there was still so _much_ she didn’t know.

It was fun to watch her learn, though.

“I’m going to bed,” she added. “Unless you need anything?”

He shook his head.

She touched his face, her fingertips gentle against his frown lines. “You sure?”

He didn’t pretend ignorance, just considered and said, “Yes.” He cupped her cheek and kissed her, leisurely and thorough. “I’ll be up soon.”

She nodded, and stood.

“Hey, Lucy?”

She looked back from the doorway.

“Congratulations again. Dr. Preston.”

She felt her smile grow until it mirrored his own. “Thank you.”

#

Wyatt, Rufus thought, was probably really sorry he’d asked how work was going.

Jiya fished out silverware. “… plus, Connor’s being stubborn.”

“He’s totally set on using single-layer cells, and he’s ignoring the low-hanging fruit,” Rufus said over his shoulder. “We could meet his goal with multi-layer cells.”

Wyatt made a vaguely questioning noise as he put the plates out.

“Yeah, I mean, I’d have to come up with a little new math, but…”

“Oh, just a little new math,” Wyatt echoed.

“Yeah. Just like you’d describe it as _just_ taking out the guards.”

“… good point.”

“I mean,” Rufus added, “he’d used to, like, spin off an R&D unit, or at least assign a few engineers to work on something promising that came up along the way. But now we don’t have the money, so…”

“… so ‘a few engineers’ becomes the two of us messing around in our spare time,” Jiya finished.

If you could call it spare time. This was the first night all week they’d been home before eight, and that was only because Wyatt was coming. And even with the long hours they were putting in there, one of their bookshelves here was being slowly consumed by prototypes, papers, and scribbled equations.

“So, anyway.” Rufus projected fake cheer as he dumped the stir-fry into a serving bowl. “How’s _your_ job?”

“Yeah, great,” Wyatt said.

Jiya looked up from straining the pasta.

“You know,” Wyatt added, “just as simple as rooting out the remains of a three-hundred-year national conspiracy could be.”

“Um… it’s kind of horrifying that they have this many people left.” Rufus put the chicken chunks, intended for him and Wyatt, in a separate bowl.

Wyatt shook his head as they sat down to eat. “They don’t.”

Wait. What?

“What do you mean?” Jiya asked.

Wyatt took a bite first. “Remember Lucy telling us that like half of Europe is descended from Charlemagne or something?”

Oh God. “… please tell me this doesn’t end with you telling us Rittenhouse is in Europe,” Rufus said.

“ _No_ , I mean, she said it was ‘cause families eventually die out or…”

“… have like a thousand descendants,” Jiya finished.

“Yeah. So. The Rittenhouse families we know about, some of ‘em had a lot of branches. And, because we _know_ Rittenhouse recruits through family, we have to check ‘em all out.”

“ _That_ sounds fun,” Rufus said.

“Well, the alternative is leaving them to rear their ass-ugly heads again in ten years,” Wyatt pointed out.

Rufus looked at Jiya.

Jiya looked at Rufus.

“Exactly,” Wyatt added. “Most of ‘em are totally normal people. And about three percent are psychotic sleeper cells.”

“Besides the fact that it… totally sucks,” Jiya said after a minute, “is it actually going okay?”

“We’ll get the bastards.” Wyatt’s confidence had to be taken in light of all the times he’d been cocky and _wrong_ , but it still helped.

Rufus got up for the salt, which had migrated into the kitchen. When he sat down again, Wyatt was spaced out, frowning.

“… Wyatt?” Rufus prompted after a minute.

Wyatt’s head snapped up. “… sorry.”

“You okay, man?”

Wyatt opened his mouth. Rufus waited for the usual denial.

“… I miss Grace.”

Oh.

Jiya made a sympathetic face. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Three weeks ago.”

That wasn’t too bad, right? Except, she wasn’t very old; three weeks was a long time. Rufus remembered that from when Kevin was little.

“I’m going up to talk with Agent Christopher tomorrow,” Wyatt added. “Look at something her eggheads have found. So, I’ll spend the weekend, see Grace then.”

Rufus still didn’t understand why it even made sense for Wyatt to be at Pendleton when he was still assigned to Denise for the Rittenhouse hunt, but okay.

“Hey,” Wyatt said, after a minute of staring at the table looking kind of mopey. “Whatever happened with, uh, Lucy’s birthday?”

Flynn had texted them all a while back, which had been… kind of weird. Rufus was still getting used to this whole socializing outside of war thing with him. His very careful, somewhat awkward message had said that what Lucy wanted for her birthday was to see them all, which was, okay, sweet. But… “It’s hard to coordinate five people in two cities eight hours apart?”

“You guys could come up next time I have to head up there,” Wyatt said. “We could, I don’t know, surprise her.”

Rufus looked at Jiya, then at Wyatt. Surprise Lucy “I like to be in control” Preston?

“… fine, maybe that part’s a bad idea. The point is, I’m up there sometimes, you go up there to visit your mom and brother…”

“When’s your next trip after this one?” Jiya asked. “This weekend we’re using Stasia’s wedding present, but—”

Wyatt’s eyes widened. “Whoa, I don’t need to hear more.”

… what? Did Wyatt have something against—

Jiya looked at him blankly. “What?”

“No offense, guys, but I don’t need to be thinking about that, and _you_ don’t want me thinking about that—”

Jiya glanced sideways at Rufus, as confused as he was. “Wyatt, what are you talking about?”

“Stasia? The lady who got you ‘Klingon marital aids?’”

Rufus choked on a bit of carrot. Klingon _marital_ — his eyes started to water. He got the carrot down, but started laughing so hard he might actually bust a rib.

Wyatt looked irritated.

Jiya wasn’t much better. “Stasia got us tickets to Spaceland,” she managed to choke out. “The— theme park. She told you—?!” Jiya glanced at Rufus, and dissolved into fresh laughter.

“Stasia’s a weapons-grade troll, Wyatt,” Jiya finally managed to explain, as Rufus wiped his eyes. “She must’ve thought you looked gullible.”

“Which he apparently was,” he pointed out. Wyatt’s look of irritation intensified, which was just irresistible. “What would Klingon marital aids even look like?” Rufus added.

Jiya cocked her head, took it, and ran with it. “Well, they have to deal with all those tentacles, so maybe—”

“Nice try,” Wyatt snapped. “I’ve seen Star Trek.”

Rufus snickered. Jiya smirked.

“‘Today is a good day to die— in bed?’” Rufus suggested.

“Oh my God, I don’t need to hear any _more_ —”

“What, big bad Delta Force can’t handle a little geek humor?”

“So,” Wyatt said forcefully. “Spaceland, huh?”

Jiya snickered again. “Yeah. Retro rocket ship rides, super-realistic VR moon walks, and space dots. Should be great.”

She’d left out the best part. “They have a whole exhibit on the moon landing. I wanna see what they say about Katherine Johnson now.”

Wyatt smiled a little.

“… may your blood scream, in bed?” Jiya suggested, after he was gone.

Rufus kissed her neck. He hadn’t thought about it earlier, but… when he’d choked on the carrot, she hadn’t even reacted. Not like when she’d freaked out in the kitchen in Nebraska, that first morning.

He knew she hated talking to the therapist, because she hated admitting to weakness. Kind of like a Klingon herself, actually… _only_ in that way, and he was grateful for that.

Well, plus, she was really fierce. But only in those two ways.

But she no longer got that pinched look between her eyebrows if he was out of her sight for too long, and it was less often that she suddenly grabbed him in the middle of the night and desperately clung to him. Which— yes, but honestly, it was too hard for him to see her in pain like that for him to enjoy it.

He was proud of her for going.

He kissed her collarbone. “He doesn’t eat gagh, in bed?” he suggested.

“Oh, come on, that one’s too easy.”

“Really?” he asked innocently. He gently tugged her shirt up so he could kiss her tattoo. He had to bend kind of awkwardly, but it was worth it when he kissed it again and heard her swallow a throaty groan. “What do you mean?”

Also? The tattoo itself was just really, really hot.

“I mean—”

She broke off as he knelt and trailed his lips further down her ribcage.

“I mean—” she tried again, until he eased his tongue along the line of the flat muscles flanking that little cushiony pillow of her belly right below her navel. She gasped. “Rufus—”

He paused right above her low-slung waistline, and sucked a mark against her hipbone.

“ _Ru_ fus—”

#

After a while, the rhythm of her footfalls became meditative. The worries in her mind started to quiet, the lesser ones first, until she was left grappling with the true questions.

She’d missed running. The first time she’d gone out, after— after, she’d expected it to be difficult, as out of practice as she was. It was not. She was in better shape than before; her breaths came more slowly. She’d always assumed her clumsiness was genetic and unyielding, but months of training and sparring with Garcia had given her a certain grace, a certain reaction speed, that made sudden cracks and rises in the pavement less of a menace.

And she didn’t fear falling, any more. She knew how to get up again.

Garcia was home when she returned— at the table, for once. He looked up and gave her an absent smile as she took off her running shoes and poured herself a glass of water. Then he went back to his books.

She watched him as she drank the water down. It delighted her that he’d practically become a permanent fixture in this room… but, sometimes, she wondered if he ever got restless.

As she watched, he raised his mug slowly to his lips, apparently discovered it was empty, and lowered it again, all without taking his eyes off the page.

She smiled. At least today, her worry seemed groundless.

She brushed her hand across the back of his shoulders as she retrieved the mug, and refilled it from the kettle on the stove. She kissed his temple when she put the mug in front of him again. He smiled up at her, put the book down—

She intercepted it before it reached the table, grabbed the nearest of the stash of bookmarks she’d distributed pointedly around the first floor, marked his place, and closed the book properly—

— unabashed, he slid one hand to the small of her back, then stretched up and kissed her, apparently indifferent to her sweat and general dishevelment.

She leaned against the table, and studied him for a moment for the sheer pleasure of it. He just watched her, letting her take her time.

She looked away, still overwhelmed, as she sometimes was, by his obvious quiet pleasure in being in her company. “I found out today that the UCSD history department is hiring.” Spring semester faculty searches were unusual, but their fall search had imploded after the chair had gotten sick.

She hesitated. “I want to apply.” She knew she’d be a strong candidate. UCSD would want a compelling explanation for why she wanted to leave Stanford for a less prestigious school, to be sure she didn’t plan to rest on her laurels and look down her nose at the rest of the department. But her mother’s death and the arrest of members of the Stanford department were public information. And she could tell them she wanted a department that valued teaching more.

There’d be the logistics of selling the house, of moving. She wasn’t sure what that would do to Garcia’s work with Homeland Security. Judith would have to find a new place to live. And that was all assuming Lucy even _got_ the job—

First things first. “Would you come with me to San Diego?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “I can’t think of many places I _wouldn’t_ go with you,” he said. “All the hellholes I’d prefer never to see again, I sure as hell wouldn’t want _you_ to go alone.”

The casual way he said things like that no longer surprised her, but it did make her catch her breath. There was nothing more simultaneously seductive and solacing than a man who’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her through a merciless war, who now wanted to stay beside her as they rebuilt their life in peace.

He stood, and looked down at her with that tenderness she’d seen hints of so early in their relationship. “I will gladly come with you to San Diego,” he said. His smile became a little less wholesome. “Knock ‘em dead, Lucy.”

#

She’d been an idiot to think moving to San Diego would help.

Life had gotten harder after Wyatt returned to Pendleton and she and Kevin finally coerced Mom, who was obviously, ludicrously homesick, into going home.

… now that Mom and Dad had the money for plane tickets from California to Texas.

She wrenched her mind out of that unhelpful rut.

Wyatt and Mom leaving left her asking Kevin to watch Grace while she worked. He was pretty much always willing to, but… he had his own job. He had to _sleep_. She was pretty sure his willingness was based out of guilt over Rittenhouse and everything, and she couldn’t keep taking advantage of that.

So, Kevin, or occasionally Miguel, but _that_ was just out of the goodness of his heart and Jess certainly couldn’t rely on him. Otherwise Jessica paid Eliza next door to watch Grace alongside Eliza’s granddaughter, whose mom worked nights too. The money Wyatt sent had meant Jess hadn’t been going broke, but— she’d known that wasn’t a good long-term solution. Besides, San Diego wasn’t the Bay but it wasn’t cheap, either. How much could _he_ afford?

Wyatt had been the one to suggest the move. “I know it’s a lot to ask,” he’d said. “But I wanna do this fairly. It’s not— putting this all on you— I don’t want to be that kind of a dad.”

“You’re not a deadbeat, Wyatt. You’re helping support her.”

That hadn’t helped. “All I’m good for is a paycheck, huh?”

She’d sighed. “Pretty sure you know I didn’t mean that. I’m tired and it’s four am.”

He’d made a face. “I know— I just—…” He’d turned away, and started fidgeting with the bottle parts drying by the sink. “I _miss_ her.”

She hadn’t been immune to the yearning in his voice. And it sure as hell was not easy raising a child with someone who was five hundred miles away. He came up every few weeks to consult with Agent Christopher in person, and he’d usually watch Grace in the evenings then while Jessica worked. But that left _him_ exhausted, and when he wasn’t here Jessica was solo parenting and exhausting _herself_ , and…

Her whole life had felt like a merry-go-round she was about to fall off of. Compared to what her life _could’ve_ been— she had so much better than she deserved. She wasn’t complaining. But she also wasn’t so sure how she’d keep coping.

So she’d taken a leap of faith. After all, she wanted Grace to grow up with her dad around nearly as much as he did. Miguel took her old room and her share of the rent, and he was enthusiastic enough about it to make her think, yeah, it was time to go.

It _was_ easier, being in the same city as Wyatt. Agent Christopher, apparently, was keeping him attached to Homeland Security for leading Rittenhouse raids whenever they came up. That meant Wyatt spent most of his time at Pendleton training others, so he wouldn’t be gone when he was needed. She knew he wasn’t thrilled about that— but he appreciated the time it gave him with Grace.

The problem was, rent was cheaper in San Diego, but even the crappy studio she’d found was more expensive than half of a two-bedroom apartment. She wasn’t paying as much for childcare, because Wyatt did more of that, but she was paying more in rent and other expenses. She was working whenever she possibly could, and still, she wasn’t breaking even. She wasn’t actually in debt, not yet, thanks to some savings, but she had more money going out than in, and that was no way to live.

Plus, Wyatt got to spend more time with Grace now, but he was running ragged. They both were. Her shifts left her running on dregs, relying on her Rittenhouse training to get her home and through the door… like now.

She unlocked the door quietly, hoping Grace was asleep. Looked like it: Wyatt was in the living room, watching something on the computer. Jessica didn’t let herself think even for a second about whether it felt nice to be coming home to him. It wasn’t like that, after all.

He looked up when she came in. She put her coat over the back of one of the dinette chairs, collapsed in it, and put her aching feet up on another. “How’d it go?”

“Fine.” He got up and stretched, exposing the skin above his waistband, all muscles and dark hair—

 _Stop that_.

“She slept pretty good,” he added, opening the fridge. “Rough shift?”

“Just another double,” she sighed. “And I had to throw an asshole out after he got aggressive with one of my customers.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “The worst part is, she didn’t even seem surprised.”

Wyatt handed her a bowl.

“What’s this?” It looked like mac and cheese.

“Leftovers. We’re fancy in the Logan household,” he added with a crooked grin.

“ _Thank_ you.” She pretty much inhaled it.

God, she was tired. Must be age. Another reason she couldn’t keep doing this forever. But she didn’t know what else to do.

It came back to her, Carol saying, _she cleans houses to make ends meet, Jessica_. _Wouldn’t you like to do better for your own children?_

Abruptly, she put her spoon down and tiptoed over to the crib to check on Grace, not out of any distrust for Wyatt, just… he wasn’t the only one who missed her.

She was turning into such a happy baby, often giggling and babbling. She knew the sound of her name. She knew Jessica’s face. Sometimes Jess was afraid to feel this glad to have her daughter around. After everything, it felt like bad luck.

She sat down again. “She rolled onto her tummy earlier,” Wyatt said.

Jess smiled, then sighed softly. Grace was growing up so _fast_. Wyatt seemed to be around for more than his share of these firsts. Was Jessica just not paying attention? Or was she really gone that much?

She smiled again. “You know she’s gonna be crawling soon.”

“One problem at a time,” Wyatt muttered.

Jessica got up to put the bowl in the sink, and winced. Wyatt saw. “You all right?”

“Fine, just sore.”

“From throwing that guy out?”

She shook her head. “Ran into a chair. The asshole wasn’t any problem.”

“Guess I don’t have to ask where you learned that,” he said after a minute.

“That’s right.” She kept her voice even. “They taught me well. And they may be megalomaniacal bastards— they _are_ — but their training is damn useful.”

Wyatt made a non-committal noise.

“That’s how we met, you know,” Jess added.

“I’m still not sure I believe that you helped me fight off those three guys.”

She scoffed. “Why, ‘cause you did such a great job of it on your own?”

He looked away. “… fair enough.”

She sat back down and put her feet back up. Rittenhouse’s training _was_ damn useful, but it scared her. What part of it was okay to use? The answer couldn’t be _none of it_ , because then she wouldn’t— she’d have nothing left. But she didn’t know where the line was.

She was tired enough to say, “The more time goes by… the more it all horrifies me.” She’d never shot _Wyatt_ , but she’d held him at gunpoint, twice. And she could’ve… if he hadn’t gotten her family to safety, she would’ve ended up…

“You ever— you ever just think about what you’ve done, and it’s awful and you can’t fix it?” she added.

When he didn’t say anything, she looked up. He was staring at her intently, almost like he’d never seen her before.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

She looked back to the floor, to avoid the intensity of that look. “I really thought we were gonna save the world,” she admitted, feeling foolish even saying it. “And now…” She struggled for the right words. “I know that’s not true. But the world’s still a mess. So who _is_ gonna save it?” She shook her head slowly. “It’s like finding out Santa is actually Satan.”

He snorted.

She’d twisted herself into such strange shapes to believe Rittenhouse, serve Rittenhouse. Slowly unfurling felt… strange.

She yawned.

He stood up. “I’ll get out of your hair. See you tomorrow— today— unless they call me in.”

“Yeah,” she yawned again.

There were times she thought Wyatt might’ve truly forgiven her for everything… like when he showed up the next morning with _breakfast_. She was used to eating cold leftovers one-handed. Getting to sit down and have hot coffee and donuts and yogurt and fruit while Wyatt fed Grace? It felt like getting a three-page love letter.

Then she took the chance to get groceries without taking Grace, blitzing through the aisles with an efficiency she hadn’t known before parenthood. After that, she did two loads of laundry and finally collapsed into bed for a short nap, as long as she had the chance. The dresser and bookshelves that separated her bed from the rest of the studio didn’t stop the noise, but knowing Wyatt was looking after Grace would let her block it all out.

She woke up to a quiet apartment, shook off the sleep, and walked around the bookshelf. Wyatt was sprawled on the couch, mouth open, Grace against his side, fast asleep.

Her heart did an uncomfortable flip or two at the sight of the two of them together. He’d never stopped being attractive to her— hell, even _her_ Wyatt had never stopped being attractive, though his bad behavior had overwhelmed _that_ feeling. And with their kid…

She swallowed. There was no point in dwelling on the past and what she couldn’t have any more. More importantly, Grace was about to slide onto her stomach. Jessica crept forward and reached for her. If she was very good she could turn Grace onto the safer position of her back without waking either of—

Wyatt grabbed her wrists hard.

“ _Let go!_ ” The words exploded out of her in a voice that didn’t seem like her own. She yanked hard— he let go, or she pulled free, one of those— she stumbled backwards as he sat up and grabbed Grace.

She found herself on the other side of the room. It took a conscious effort not to rub her wrists.

“Jessica?” His tone put a lot of meaning into those three syllables. “You okay?”

She took a deep breath. “Guess we startled each other.”

“I’m sorry. I just, uh… woke up and, uh, reacted. Are you okay?”

“Fine.” She gave him a bright smile.

He looked skeptical.

“You hungry?” she added. “I’m gonna make something.”

“Uh. Sure, thanks. I’ll… oh God. Clean up our kid’s butt. C’mere, you.” He hoisted Grace onto the coffee table.

She nearly fell asleep over her chicken, which wasn’t a good sign. Wyatt noticed, of course.

“I took a short-term apartment when I moved down here,” he said. “Wasn’t sure what was going to be happening. The lease is up soon. I’m looking for another place.”

She nodded.

“They mark those short-term contracts up, it’s not much more for me to get a two-bedroom.” He hesitated. “You and Grace could move in.”

Jessica choked.

“As _roommates_ ,” Wyatt said. “I can cover the rent, we can both look after her… It’s what I was thinking when I suggested you move in the first place. Didn’t realize you hadn’t picked up on that ’til you went apartment hunting.”

“I’m not moving in with you, Wyatt.”

“Why not?”

“I just—” So many reasons. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“If you don’t tell me why not, I can’t problem solve.”

She looked him dead in the eyes. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said. “When you trust me, or when you don’t.”

He watched her. “Should I trust you, Jess?” he asked quietly.

“No.” It came out reflexively. “Not because of what I’m going to do. Because of what I’ve already done.”

He shouldn’t trust her. But she really, really wanted him to.

He looked disappointed, like she’d failed some kind of test.

“We have a pretty tangled history, Wyatt,” she added. “I don’t think being roommates is a good idea.”

She didn’t like lying to him, even lying by omission. But she wasn’t gonna tell him the truth.

“We also have a kid,” he said. “Jess, I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself.”

She looked at him in disbelief. Maybe a little scorn mixed in there. “‘cause you did such a great job last time?”

… yeah, he wasn’t happy about that one.

He looked around. “The, uh, cockroach traps you have under all the furniture really add to the place.”

“Don’t be an ass, Wyatt, okay?” She took both their empty plates to the sink and scrubbed them hard.

“I’m trying to _help_.”

“Well, I’m _fine_. _We’re_ fine. Okay?”

“Just think about, Jessica. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Fine,” she repeated. “I’ll think about it.”

#

She snapped out of her doze when the key turned in the lock, but she was slow getting up. Wyatt found her still on the floor. He was early.

He frowned as he dropped a bag of clean laundry on the floor. He had a washer and dryer, she didn’t, so he sometimes took Grace’s stuff home with him. “Jessica?”

“Hi.” She got to her feet.

“… you okay?”

“Fine.”

He looked skeptical. His own tiredness came out in his tone. “What’re you playing at, Jess?”

“ _Supporting my child_ is what I’m playing at.”

“Oh, really? Could’ve fooled me—”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“You’re taking all these shifts, running yourself ragged—”

“To make _rent_ , Wyatt!”

“— and it’s _gonna_ affect her— when I offered you my spare bedroom!”

She stared at him.

“I guess that’s just too hard a pill to swallow, huh,” he added, with that rare pettiness she hated. “Guess before, when you were so eager to live with me, that was all a front? You were willing to stay with _Rittenhouse_ to protect your baby, but you won’t—”

“For God’s sake, Wyatt!”

Her outburst halted his venom.

“I know you think as bad of me as you possibly can, I know you think I’m a liar and a killer, but for God’s sake, do you think I don’t have any feelings?”

He frowned, confused.

“You were my _mission_ , Wyatt. They raised me to make you my target. And now, when I’m trying to rebuild my own life for the first time _in_ my life, you think I should move in with _you?_ ”

The anger and confusion drained out of his expression, leaving him watching her seriously.

“We have a kid together. And she’s the most important thing to me. And even if we didn’t, I’m not saying I’d want you out of my life, but—” She trailed off.

“You and Rittenhouse, Wyatt,” she said quietly. “You were the poles my life turned around for a long, long time.”

After a minute, he took her by surprise by saying, “I’m sorry.”

She blinked at him. “For what?”

He sighed. “For being the reason they did that to you.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that. But they took your life and made it about me, and it was _because_ of me.”

She looked down, more touched by that than she wanted to let on.

Honesty was addictive. But right now she was, if not flat-out lying to Wyatt, fudging the truth. Everything she’d told him was true… but he didn’t need to know one particular reason _why_ she was so anxious to rebuild a life with less of him, _why_ she was so reluctant to move in with him.

He certainly didn’t need to know why it was sometimes so difficult to be close to him.

But Grace _was_ the most important thing in her life. And Wyatt was right: the way things were now was affecting her. Should Jessica just bite the damn bullet and take that second bedroom if it would be the best thing for their daughter?

… have to see Wyatt every day? Watch him with their kid? See him sleepy and rumpled— see him maybe bring other women _home_ —

Her fist started to clench.

“Look, I know, I don’t get that part of it,” he said quietly. “But you wouldn’t have to work these long hours. You could spend as much time with her as you want. Wouldn’t miss any more of her firsts.”

“I’m not asking you to support me, Wyatt.”

“You think I don’t know that looking after her is _damned_ hard work?” he demanded. “You think I don’t think that’s important? Jess, _this isn’t working_ —”

“This was your idea!”

“I didn’t mean you should move to San Diego and work yourself to the bone paying rent on a roach-infested dump! That’s no place to raise a kid, and I want _better_ for her!”

She knew he was speaking from his experience. Speaking as Kenny Logan’s son, right now.

“What are we, Wyatt?” she asked tiredly. “Co-parents? Friends?”

He hesitated.

“Okay, not friends.”

“In this together?” he suggested.

“Co-parents. Fine.” It was fine. It was.

“How can we be friends if you don’t want me to trust you?”

That was a home shot, all right, but she didn’t want him to see that. _Yeah, this is all my fault one way or another_. “You’d be an idiot to trust me again.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because—” Her voice threatened to get a little thick. She wasn’t gonna cry. She was better trained than that. “It’s true.”

“I don’t think of you as a liar and a killer, Jess,” he said after a minute. “You did lie. To me. But I know there’s more to you than that, or I wouldn’t for one second have let you near our kid—”

He broke off and shoved past her. She spun— was it a threat— Wyatt grabbed Grace out of her crib—

“Kill it,” he snapped, checking Grace’s clothes.

 _What?_ She glanced at the crib— Grace had somehow managed to poop in—

It was _moving_. _They_ were moving. She grabbed the nearest shoe and beat both roaches mercilessly to death. She only stopped when she realized she was grinding the remains into the sheet.

Oh God, that was disgusting.

“I’ll put the legs of the crib in some… soapy water or something,” she said.

“How do you know they didn’t fall off the ceiling?”

She shuddered before she could stop herself.

He sat Grace in the middle of the table, took out his keys, and pulled one off the ring. “This is my spare key—”

“You keep your spare key with your normal key?”

“She’s coming home with me. And she’s staying there until the bugs are gone. You wanna join us after your shift, you’re more than welcome.”

“I—” _You can’t just_ take _her_ , Jessica wanted to say, except she was just as revolted as he was.

“I’ll pack you a bag while you’re gone,” he continued.

She wavered. “Do you even have furniture in that room?”

“I’ll take the couch.”

It _was_ tempting.

“Look, I’m not saying it’s your fault. You could keep this place clean enough to eat off the floor and they’d still come in from your neighbors.”

And she definitely didn’t keep this place clean enough to eat off the floor.

“… maybe a trial run,” she muttered.

#

She had to admit, Wyatt had his moments.

When she let herself into his place around four, he was sleeping on the couch beside the crib. On his bed was a duffel bag that must’ve been in his _car_ , with three days’ worth of her clothes, some pajamas, and toiletries. He’d even changed the sheets.

Show-off.

The next morning over coffee, she said, “What if we try this and it doesn’t work out?”

“Then I’ll crash on Dave’s couch until you can find a new place.”

“You don’t have to be chivalrous, Wyatt.”

“What, I should throw you out instead? Don’t be ridiculous.”

She grumbled into her coffee.

“I _asked_ you to move down here. She’s _my kid_. I wanna make this work out whatever way’s best for her.”

He at least didn’t add, _which isn’t living with cockroaches_. “Yeah, I want that too,” Jessica sighed. She looked at him. “What if I want to bring someone home?”

She absolutely, positively did not want to bring anyone home. But she wanted to know what he’d say.

He winced.

“I wasn’t intending to be a _nun_ until she’s eighteen,” Jessica added.

“C’mon, Jess, you nearly fell asleep in your dinner last weekend,” he said. “You really wanna tell me you have the energy to go out and pick someone up right now?”

“Sure, I could put it in my Tinder profile,” she said. “Female, thirty-three, smart, fit, sometimes wears her food on her face.”

He snorted. “Look, when she gets older things’ll get easier,” he said. “I’m not suggesting you stay here for the next seventeen years. We’ll, when it’s time to figure something else out, we will.”

Yeah, okay. She drank more coffee. “What if _you_ want to bring someone home?”

“I’m training soldiers by day and raising a kid by night. Not even on my radar right now.”

After a few minutes, she asked, “Are you even allowed to have me here? Isn’t that a security risk with you still fighting Rittenhouse?”

Or was that the whole point? Would having her here let him keep closer tabs on her?

“You know, at some point, you’re gonna have to suck it up and accept that someone decided to give you a second chance.” He his mug to the sink.

She stared after him, eyebrows going up. Damn. Before her Wyatt disappeared, it’d been a long time since he’d cared enough to be that perceptive.

She was afraid her being here would go really, really badly. But the thought of being able to spend even a little more time with Grace, especially now when it seemed like she was growing like a weed… that was so hard to resist. And if it meant their daughter would benefit by having both parents around more?

She couldn’t pass that up.

So she told him she’d give it a shot. Before she worked her next double, that day, she swung by the apartment for her cot and some other stuff. The next day was Sunday, and she didn’t work; it was a slower night, a good time for their less experienced bartender. So she and Wyatt brought the rest of what she thought they needed, over from her apartment. She checked everything, especially the food, carefully for unwanted passengers… and found herself remembering the last time she’d lived around vermin. They’d kept the Rittenhouse bunker in the ‘30s scrupulously clean, aware they only had so many antibiotics…

So the last time had been that deserted store, in San Francisco.

She heard Wyatt come out of the bathroom behind her. “Did Cahill die slowly?” she asked, staring out the back window, rocking Grace gently. She was getting heavy, but Jessica wanted her close just now.

He stopped. “Few minutes. Emma got two close-range shots.”

Even as a Rittenhouse agent, she’d never been big on wishing unnecessary pain and suffering on anyone. But for Cahill, she made an exception.

Wyatt had given them both a quiet, clean, smell-free place to stay. He’d packed up a large chunk of her apartment with startling efficiency. And he hadn’t asked anything in return. So she found herself asking, quietly, “You have nightmares about war, right?”

“Yeah.” One quick word held a lot of meaning.

She took a deep breath. He was interested in trusting her, right? “My single worst nightmare,” she said slowly, “is he comes after _her_ —” She looked down at her sleeping daughter— “and I stand there and watch helplessly.”

He came up beside her. “I’d like to see what could get through both of us to hurt her.”

She looked up quickly. It wasn’t what she’d expected him to say at all, and it was surprisingly reassuring. She nodded slowly, and swallowed hard.

He cleared his throat. “Can I, uh, help?”

She heard her own bleak, level voice saying, “Take that damn time machine back to 1980 and kill Emma before she finds Carol at that conference and puts it in her head to—” She broke off, and swallowed again. She wiped her eyes roughly and awkwardly, trying not to disturb her girl. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to manipulate you.”

“Are you?”

“No, but I have before. And you spent a long time not getting over a woman with my face.”

“That’s not on you.”

She was quiet for a minute. “When you got my family out,” she said slowly. “That was what did it. But _before_ that? Wyatt, I— I was _relieved_ she was out of there.” And she hadn’t known _what_ to do with that feeling.

She exhaled. “If Flynn hadn’t shot me—”

Which he’d only done because she’d been holding Wyatt at gunpoint.

That was enough vulnerability for one day, that was damn sure. She cleared her throat. “How much is the rent on this place?”

“Jessica—”

“How much, Wyatt?”

He told her.

“And the utilities?”

He gave her an estimate. She did the math in her head. “I could drop a shift.”

“That’s really not what I had in mind when I invited you—”

“Do you _mind_ looking after her when I’m at work?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then let me find my own way, Wyatt.” She boosted Grace up yet again as she threatened to slide out of Jessica’s arms.

He exhaled. “The point of this was that we could both be more rested and _around_ more for our kid, Jess.”

“We’ll figure it out, all right?” she said. “We’ll start with this.”

Reluctantly, he nodded.

#

He had no idea how the hell Lucy did this for a living.

He stared at the papers and books spread out across half the kitchen island, and mussed his hair in frustration. You couldn’t just _say_ an author was an idiot, even when it was readily apparent to anyone with two brain cells. You had to back it up with sources, and even then you had to be _diplomatic_ about it. How was that not a waste of time?

Besides, much of what he wanted to say, the source was his memory. They were going to the Balkans soon, to try to find some of the men— and a few women— he’d fought beside. Talk to them, get their recollections. That could be a tricky proposition, as prodding at old wounds always was. But better him than some desk-bound historian who barely spoke any of the languages, for whom the whole thing was, well, academic.

His book straddled the line between primary and secondary source, which was possibly one reason why it was so difficult. According to Dr. Preston, when one of your main sources was your own experiences, you couldn’t just write a whole book about the fact that other authors were full of shit and be taken seriously. According to Dr. Preston, if he was going to engage with the literature, he had to _engage_ with the literature, not simply attack it.

He didn’t think she was _wrong_ about the conventions in her field. He just thought they were asinine.

It frankly would’ve been easier were he only synthesizing other sources. But there was a story here that no one had gotten quite right, and he was, perhaps, one of the few in the world in a position to tell it well. Which meant dragging out painful memories. And would mean dragging equally painful memories out of others, later.

He mussed his hair again, then began flipping through the book farthest from him. He was looking for a particularly fatuous claim that needed refuting. Did it even actually _exist_ , or had his disgust twisted it in his memory into a straw man?

What he _did_ find, in each book he looked through, was about five separate side issues that needed or wanted addressing. He tried to keep a list, but each beckoned him down a tantalizing trail, minutes passing before he’d snap out of it and remember his original search.

This whole damn thing was getting ridiculously out of hand, like a military campaign embroiled in insurgent territory. He’d never known writing projects could be so dangerously _expansive_.

He was glad he hadn’t had to threaten anyone at gunpoint lately. He hoped it lasted. But these books weren’t _talking_.

He was glad…

Sometimes, this new phase of his life felt very, very strange. But usually, the strangeness was that of waking from a vivid nightmare.

And when, at three am, he was tempted to wonder what right he, who had already ruined himself, had to stay home like this when there were so many battles still out there, he rolled over and held Lucy tightly, remembering what he’d told her about not being a human sacrifice. Remembering how he’d asked her to trust him that she didn’t owe this to anyone. Remembering her faith in him that he could be more than a soldier.

The man he’d been with Lorena and Iris truly had died that night. Yet he was also not the grim, revenge-driven man he’d become after that. In some ways, Lucy had saved him; in others, she’d lit his way for him to fumble out of his dark prison himself.

Garcia hadn’t been sure, standing on Lucy’s doorstep, how domesticity would sit with him. But respite had not yet begun to feel like cowardice, and he began to suspect it never would. He had not dreamed of anything resembling peace before her, but—

As in so many things, she had been right and he had been wrong.

He would always have the blood he’d spilled on his hands; he would always have to reckon with his guilt that he had survived and the people he’d killed had not, however necessary he’d thought their deaths. But if he didn’t have to spill any more— not undeservedly, maybe not at all… that would be enough.

 _There!_ Damn it, there. He’d found it. Oh, and it was just as ridiculous as he remembered. Afraid he would lose the page, he grabbed a pen left-handed and scrawled the title and page number on the nearest sheet of paper, along with the notation _ASS_ , so he never had to repeat this search.

He paused, and turned the paper over, but it was only a spare sheet from their insurance statement.

Insurance. That reminded him of something he’d promised this morning.

Lucy had been up last night, shaking, and crying. She’d choked out the bare bones of her nightmare, and then burrowed against his chest for a good hour before he’d felt her relax into sleep. He’d waited until the light of day, until they were both a bit more collected, to very carefully make a suggestion.

“I’m fine,” Lucy had said.

He’d sipped his coffee. “How much are you asking for the bridge?”

She’d given him a sharp look.

“I’ll go if you do,” she’d tried next.

“I don’t need—”

She’d put down the knife and turned to give him a look of flat-out disbelief.

… well, all right, perhaps.

So he’d agreed to contact Agent Christopher, to ask for a list of therapists cleared by Homeland Security, so he could begin searching for one who also took their insurance.

He’d seen the inside of a therapist’s office very occasionally the last ten, fifteen years, mostly at Lorena’s urging. He didn’t trust strangers with his secrets. But living among fighters most of his life, he’d seen what the horrors of war could do to a person if left to eat away at the psyche, unchecked.

Lucy deserved better. And perhaps they could even help him, though he’d long ago achieved a détente with…

Some of it, anyway.

He made the call, then turned back to his book. Lucy had clearly rubbed off on him, because, damn it, now he was thinking of this as a story, and invested in seeing it told. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that talking about past wars prevented future ones, but— if nothing else—

It _deserved_ to be told, and told right. If only for the ghosts he’d known for thirty years. How this distinctive little intersection of the world had violently convulsed itself by ingesting a lethal mix of yearning for independence and resentment of people-not-like-us.

Lucy was _definitely_ rubbing off on him.

He closed his laptop and decided to let the structure of the chapter sit for a while. He’d come back to it with fresh eyes. Meanwhile, he had plenty to do packing, because Lucy had gotten the UCSD job. They’d found a house down there that they both liked, and put together a down payment out of what had been her mother’s savings, and what had been his and Lorena’s.

He looked down at his hand, the pale band where he’d worn his wedding ring slowly becoming less distinct. It still hurt, thinking of all the plans he and Lorena had made for their future. He regretted nothing with Lucy except that it had cost them both so much pain to get here… but no amount of time, no amount of happiness, would change the fact that Lorena and Iris should have lived and he had failed to save them. Because that was not his _feeling_. It was objective fact.

He smoothed his thumb over the ghost of his ring.

… They had a house down there, which meant packing up _this_ house, selling or putting in storage what they weren’t taking, getting it ready to turn over to the management company that would handle its rental, and actually moving down there… during roughly the same time that Lucy was battling the quarter’s death throes, he was trying to reckon with his book and make all the arrangements for their trip, and they were going to the Balkans.

And Lucy, despite being the one of them with formal full-time employment, had apparently decided _she_ should be responsible for the vast majority of this.

He hoped that Carol Preston had an extra demon or two allotted to her just for her treatment of Lucy. Yes, she’d died to save Lucy. But he’d wager money Carol was also responsible for— among other things— Lucy’s reluctance in asking for or accepting help, this… this Protestant work ethic on steroids.

In response to his questions, he got hilariously unconvincing reassurances that she was fine, while that frown slowly reappeared between her eyebrows.

 _At least three demons_ , he thought.

The front door opened and closed, followed by familiar footsteps; speak of the devil. Lucy wandered into the kitchen leafing through the mail, then dropped the whole pile on the table. She unwound that pale blue scarf, draped bag and scarf over the back of her particular chair, and kissed him.

He did not want to ever take kissing Lucy for granted. He closed his eyes at the feel of her lips gentle against his. He reached up and slid his fingers through her hair. He wanted— more—

He stood. Her wordless noise made her displeasure very clear until he picked her up, boosted her onto the island, and kissed her again. Oh, this was much better. Yes.

After a moment or two, she pulled back far enough to look at him. She gently traced the lines of his face, as she liked to do—

He pictured her doing it when they were old, touching the imprint of the memories they’d made together.

The thought of that left him breathless. “Lucy,” he whispered.

She took it for a plea and kissed him again, harder. That subtle smell of her lotion— the feel of her tongue against his, her breasts pressed against his chest, her fingernails against his shoulders as her fingers flexed and released— those soft wanting noises she made— all gratifyingly familiar, now. She filled his senses, and he wanted more. “ _Lucy_.”

“The library—” Her breath stuttered. “Locks.”

Judith was supposed to come by for the last of her things, and after accidentally scandalizing her, twice, they’d become more discreet.

He shook his head. “I want—” Her fingers stroking lazy arcs below his waistband were making it hard to get words out. “A bed.” He swallowed, pulled her hand away, and got enough brain cells to function to lift her off the counter. She wrapped her legs tightly around him, prompting him to groan and the primal parts of his brain to insist that the bedroom was much too far away, Judith couldn’t possibly get here right now, they were both wearing _far_ too many clothes, the wall was _right there_ —

He got them halfway up the stairs before he had to turn and press her against the wall, kissing the soft skin below her collarbone for the sheer pleasure of the breathy, desperate sound she made when he did.

Somehow, he got them into their bedroom.

Possessiveness, he reflected later, had, thank God, never been one of his failings. If love made you smaller, held you back, if it were a cage— that wasn’t love, it was something else stealing love’s face. But still, seeing Lucy in the throes of overwhelming pleasure sometimes prompted an intense, primal satisfaction that it was _he_ who made her feel this way.

Lucy sighed, a half-voiced noise of satisfaction, and put her head against his shoulder. He rolled over and kissed her hair. Seeing her this relaxed was also deeply gratifying— especially now, when she was so often tense.

“Garcia?”

“Mmm.”

“There wasn’t… anything about what I… like… in the journal, was there?”

“You had a lot of opinions in the journal.”

“No— I mean—”

… what?

Ah. “Only that your— her— interests included women and men.”

She looked relieved. How long had she been thinking about that one? He thought about all the time she must’ve spent in those early days, wondering what her alternate self might’ve let slip in the pages.

She looked up at him. “I never really told many people,” she said. “Amy knew. That was one of the things we fought about, her thinking I should be more open. She thought I should tell Mom.” Lucy shook her head. “And after what Ethan told us in 1955… I’m glad I didn’t.”

She traced a lazy pattern on Garcia’s hip. “I told a boyfriend once, and his reaction was to suggest a threesome.” Her face flushed. “Sadly, it took me another week to decide to break up with him.”

He brushed her hair gently out of her face. “I’m sorry, Lucy. You didn’t deserve that.” She knew that, of course— but it wouldn’t hurt her to hear it.

She looked up at him, her expression soft— but not, thank God, surprised. “Thank you.” She leaned up and kissed the very corner of his mouth. “I guess we should get up.”

“Mmm.” He was of the opinion that they should spend a few more hours in bed— whether or not they had more sex. But Lucy sat up and started gathering her clothes.

That frown began to reappear, worryingly quickly.

“I found more boxes today,” he said. “Shall I clear out your old bedroom?”

“No, I’ll get that.”

“I’ll start in the kitchen, then.”

“I’ll get that later. Don’t worry about it, Garcia, focus on your book.” She gave him the predicted bright smile, and got dressed.

He watched her with narrowed eyes as she left.

That night, as she worked in the library, he filled three boxes in the kitchen anyway, on the theory that he was packing items used infrequently enough that she wouldn’t notice. Then he went upstairs to make a clean sweep of the master bedroom. Judith had moved out a few weeks ago. The house was considerably quieter now, Judith having had a semester of exploration in which she’d discovered, in quick succession, short hair, pants, and kissing women.

When Tom Bolick had found out about that last one, Garcia had taken the opportunity to corner him against a convenient wall and loom over him. “You will,” he’d whispered, “keep your nineteenth century homophobic bullshit to yourself. Are we clear?”

Tom had looked up— not an experience someone that tall usually had— and just nodded. Garcia had given him a toothy smile and let him go.

He joined Lucy in the library the next night after dinner. He put a glass of iced tea by her knee, and sat against one of the bookshelves, stretching his legs across the floor. His thigh had been hurting lately, courtesy of Emma and San Francisco’s damp.

Lucy looked up, and attempted a smile. “Thanks.”

He nodded, and sipped his coffee.

She frowned at one article, and dumped it in a box. She picked up the next and closed her eyes, rubbing her temples. She put it in the same box, then swallowed and wiped her eyes roughly.

Quietly, he put the tissue box from the kitchen next to the iced tea.

She gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “It’s dusty in here.”

He sipped his coffee.

She pulled a new stack off the shelf. “Oh, God, this is taking forever,” she muttered under her breath.

He sipped his coffee.

She sat back and gave him a bleak look. “This is where I feel Mom most strongly,” she said bluntly. “This— this was her domain. So everything I sort, everything I do, it’s like a value judgement.”

“Take it all and sort it in San Diego once you see the room with furniture.”

She nodded slowly, but he knew it wasn’t really about the practicalities of moving.

“Mom could do anything,” Lucy said after a minute. “She could’ve easily handled a move like this.”

“More than three,” he muttered.

“Three what?”

“… never mind.” He hesitated. “Don’t break your heart trying to be your mother, Lucy. You’re _not_ her.”

Lucy snorted softly. “I know.”

He waited until she looked up again to say, “Lucy, you won a war. By trusting someone, _someones_ , when everyone around you told you it was foolish. You are… truly remarkable. You are _inimitable_. And you are, in my opinion, worth at least ten of her.”

He _knew_ Lucy’s complicated feelings on her mother. He knew that tearing Carol Preston down was not an unmitigated good. But right now, with her shadow looming over the woman Garcia loved, he had no patience for mincing words.

Lucy stared back at him for quite a long moment. Finally she whispered, “You really believe that.”

“Because it’s _true_.”

“ _I_ — can’t believe that.”

“You can at least believe the first part. We can negotiate about the number.” Upwards, of course.

Lucy snorted again, and looked down, but her eyes were wet.

“Lucy…” He licked his top lip. “I… was a wreck, after Iris was born.”

“Sleep deprivation?”

“That too, but, uh…” He looked down at his coffee mug.

Lucy had as much patience to wait him out as he did her, not that he was trying to escape the conversation he’d started. “I was afraid I was going to hurt her,” he said softly.

He closed his eyes at the memory of those early days. “I was afraid some monster slept in my blood,” he continued. “It was ridiculous, and I _knew_ it was ridiculous, or I never would have had children. But…”

“But when she was actually there, she seemed so… small. Fragile.” He hesitated again. “I guess I lost it, a little bit. It, uh, took Lorena noticing, though she had enough else on her mind…” He took a drink to buy himself time.

“She sounds like a saint.”

Garcia choked. He managed to swallow before he choked in earnest, and then he laughed. Only the hint of brittleness in Lucy’s tone got him to wind down. “No,” he said, voice still a little unsteady. “No, she wasn’t a saint.” He paused. “Lucy, what I’m trying to say is, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t understand how your mother’s shaped you.”

She looked up fast. He looked back steadily. Then he reached out and gently took her hand, and she slid her fingers through his. There was something of a promise in their clasped hands on the wood floor of her mother’s library.

“How much of the rest of the house can I ask you to pack up?” she asked after a minute. “I hate to admit it, but these finals are killing me, and—”

“All of it.”

“That’s too much.”

“Lucy, you _asked_.”

She gave him a considering look. “Garcia, I know I’ve been… in my own head lately. How much of the rest of the house have you _already_ packed?”

He shrugged unrepentantly. Then added: “I, ah… I wasn’t going to touch your bedroom. Or the other one.”

“There’s nothing of Amy left in there.” Her voice was bleak again. “I’ve looked. Several times.”

In that train station in 1865, when Lucy had first told him her sister was gone, he’d felt only a vague sense of guilt, easily dismissed. The more he’d gotten to know Lucy, _this_ Lucy, the more that knowledge had hurt.

His pain, he knew, was only an echo of hers. And he would spend the rest of their lives watching her live with that.

“All right,” he said quietly.

“And my bedroom… honestly, everything I use is in _your_ bedroom by now.”

He nodded once. He could pack those two rooms quickly. “Can I help in here?”

Her lips twitched. “What, keep me from getting too lost in my own head?” Then she turned serious. “I don’t even know if I’m trying to hold on to the woman I thought she was, or just _exorcise_ her.”

“Lucy, I’m pretty sure your mom’s ghost flew off in high dudgeon the moment you let me cross the threshold.”

Not to mention some of their activities on that desk.

Oh, he loved how her whole expression opened up when she was surprised into laughing. “I don’t think there’s much you can do in here,” she said when she recovered.

“Here—” He reached around her for the next empty box waiting for papers, and carried it to the shelf closest to the windows. Starting at the top, he unceremoniously dumped the books into the box. When he turned around for the next box, Lucy was watching him, eyes wide, scandalized and fascinated.

“They’re all, uh, ending up in the same place anyway, right?” he said. “What’ll actually take thought is arranging them how _you_ want them.” And he very much wanted to watch her figure out where to put all her books— figured out how to make their house feel like home.

She gave him a narrow-eyed look, the corners of her mouth twitching. “How long’ve you been working on that one?”

He put the box down. “I love you.”

Her expression turned soft and open and touched with wonder. She took a step towards him, and he crossed the distance between them. He gently cupped her face, trailing his thumb along her laugh lines and frown lines like she so often did to him.

She strained up on tiptoe to wrap her arms around his neck and tug his mouth down to hers. He slid his fingers through her hair and tilted her head to just the perfect angle for a slow, thorough, open-mouthed kiss, luxuriating in the feel of her body pressed against him. She made a soft, needy, pleased sound against his mouth.

As usually happened, his neck and her calves started to ache around the same time. She sighed, and dropped back to the flats of her feet.

Looking down at her, he remembered their first kiss, sitting on that fence in deserted northwestern Nebraska. She’d scared the _shit_ out of him, turning her calm, implacable determination towards erasing herself from existence. The way she habitual undervalued herself had abruptly turned from sad and really unfortunate to viscerally _terrifying_. The thought of forgetting she’d ever existed had physically revolted him.

A new nightmare had joined his collection that night, one where she never found him in that basement in 1954, and he returned to a world devoid of her. He knew, logically, that she would have survived; he and her team would have remembered her. The nightmare had not cared.

What a turbulent night that had been, from the thought-halting _shock_ of her roughly kissing him back, to the acute ache of sorrow as she’d sobbed her overwhelmed grief out against his chest, to his utter relief when she’d agreed to abandon her plan, to the warmth that spread through him when she told him she wanted to kiss him again, sometime.

He looked down at her now, and smiled. He made himself remember what he’d come in here for to begin with. “Hand me another box,” he suggested.

#

It was weird to look at the date and think, _this time last year I was living in a secret government bunker_. Partly because she’d lived three years within a span of twelve hours in 2017, so “last year” to her felt like Chinatown.

As the year wore on, it became, _this time last year I was hiding out in Florida, trying to get Rufus back_.

She looked up at him, drinking coffee and reading through a new paper as he took a break from tweaking the optics simulator. She still had nightmares where he was killed in front of her again, or where she was back in those dark months in Florida. She’d learned to get up, go into the other room, get herself some water or tea, and sit quietly until the horror eased. Sometimes if she were out there long enough, he’d come out, and put his arm around her, and they’d snuggle quietly, or put on an old episode of Doctor Who and groan at the production values. And, honestly, she preferred that, to desperately hanging on to him as she’d used to do. She didn’t really want to come to associate his live body and his presence with dreaming of his dead one and his loss.

But the more time went on, the more the bitter, sharp pain of that loss eased. That feeling was strange, and sometimes she was afraid to trust it. On the other hand, if he were hit by a bus tomorrow—

her stomach dropped reflexively. _Oh God no._

— she didn’t want to have wasted time spent _with_ him anticipating when he wouldn’t be around any more.

“Uh, hi, Jiya?” It was Taylor, Connor’s newest engineer, fidgeting nervously with their hair, which appeared to hold, as usual, at least three pencils. “I had a question about this photon absorption equation?”

“Sure, what is it?” Jiya nudged out the chair next to her, because if she didn’t, Taylor would stand the whole time. Connor had hired Taylor on the recommendation of their mentor and adviser at Morehouse, who happened to be one of Connor’s old buddies; he’d called and advised him to recruit Taylor before they were “wasted in the defense industry.”

The shop was slowly growing, thanks to their early successes. That meant she and Rufus didn’t have to be everywhere, all the time, doing everything from theoretical optical physics to troubleshooting glue failures to new chemistry. Besides Taylor, there was Venkatesh, who was in charge of optimizing the production line as they slowly scaled up the prototypes, and Dana, another programmer, and Mika, the admin assistant.

They’d had another engineer, Nathan, but he’d lasted just as long as it had taken him to tell Jiya to get him coffee.

“Sorry,” Connor had said. “I’m not sure how he made it through my screening process. I’m usually better at filtering out—”

“Entitled douches?” Dana had suggested.

“Well… yes.”

The downside of that was that the low-hanging fruit department was now mostly back in Jiya and Rufus’s lap, but Venkatesh was starting to tinker, too.

When she and Taylor had figured out the equation, Jiya went over to join Connor and Rufus, conferring about one of the prototypes for the conference next week. “Talking about my baby?”

All three of them were going. Connor would schmooze and recruit more investors, Rufus would demonstrate the new ridiculously efficient perovskite prototype, and she…

 _She_ was taking the stage to show off this printable solar cell, a breakthrough from the low-hanging fruit division. Only a tenth as efficient as a typical cell… but at one fiftieth of the cost.

And she was still working on both those numbers. The key idea, actually, had come to her from something Connor had done to make the Lifeboat’s solar charger.

“You’re going to have to beat the headhunters off with a stick when they see this.” Connor was beaming, probably because of what he said next: “Nobody’s going to see this coming.”

Yeah, he was really enjoying stunning everyone in the tech world who’d written him off as down and out. Maybe enjoying it a little too much. Hey, as long as he had a healthy outlet for his ego. Healthy-ish.

Besides, as partners, she and Rufus had full access to the financials. They were pretty sure Connor had learned his lesson about shady financial partners… but they didn’t have to take that on trust.

“And the perovskite people are going to gnash their teeth,” Connor added, looking at Rufus. “You know, if you can get those numbers for the next version checking out this weekend, we could even—”

“Nope. I’m seeing Mom and Kevin this weekend.”

“Oh.” Connor deflated only slightly. “Well, you’re still going to stun everyone. Both of you.” He smiled at them. “A real… power couple.”

Jiya leaned up to kiss Rufus, but he groaned and pulled away. “Connor, that was awful.”

Connor chuckled as he walked away.

Rufus turned back to her, cupped the side of her face, and kissed her gently. “We’ll do something terrible to him at the conference.”

They both went home not too long after that, because Rufus had to pack, and Jiya had learned something, since getting him back, about calling it quits occasionally. She cooked while he turned the apartment upside down, looking for his lucky R2-D2 socks. After dinner she kicked his ass in Mario Kart, which turned into him tackling her to the floor, which turned into them moving onto the couch before either of them rug-burned their ass. They’d learned that lesson, thank you very much.

They showered together, and he washed her hair for her. She remembered how shy he’d been the first time he’d asked if he could. That felt so long ago. Well, it _was_ nearly five years for her.

She drove him to the airport early in the morning so he could catch his flight to San Francisco. “Are you still having lunch with Lucy?”

He shook his head. “She’s giving an exam today. Besides, they’ll be down here, what, next month?”

“Yeah, once they get back from Croatia.”

He hesitated. “They’re not going to, like… come back married, right? That would be weird.”

“They’d better not. We owe her a wedding toast.” Jiya got out so she could wrap her arms around Rufus. “Be careful?”

He nodded, and kissed her. That went on until someone behind them honked angrily. Jiya rolled her eyes, but let go of him.

“I’ll see you Monday,” she told him.

“Yep.” He kissed her one more time, light and quick, and headed inside the terminal.

#

Garcia leaned against the windowsill, looking at the city below as the early morning light crept across it.

The weather was balmy, even by Lucy’s California-born standards— warmer than the Bay Area, right now. And the days were full of light, only a month from their longest. It was a good time to visit.

He hadn’t been sure how this would go, traveling together. They’d never done that outside the context of war. But he was glad they’d planned it this way. He frankly would have missed her, coming here alone for two weeks… and returning with someone who’d never been gave him a fresh perspective. He’d always thought that this country was only beautiful in his memory, because it had been his first home. Through Lucy’s eyes, he saw the beauty all over again.

It did ache a little, being back here at this time of the year. Lorena, May 11th, and Iris, May 18th. They’d had such fun celebrating the two birthdays a week apart, and this cusp of spring and summer had become “birthday season” in his mind. Being here, now, brought it all back so strongly.

He took a quiet breath, and simply let it hurt for a moment.

Their collective calendar was, in some ways, treacherous to navigate. Besides those birthdays, there was his wedding anniversary with Lorena… and the day Rittenhouse had murdered her and Iris.

And then Amy Preston’s birthday, October 27th, and the day Garcia had erased her from existence, September 9th.

He fully expected one or both of them to slip and fall on those metaphorical rocks at some point. But they were now experts in picking themselves back up… and when they couldn’t, they had the other to help.

Just a few years ago he’d thought his heart cauterized. Yet he _loved_ Lucy, fiercely, unguardedly. He’d lost everything before, in the space of a breath, yet he was not, in the end, cautious before the possibility of more searing loss.

He was defiant.

He looked at Lucy, still sleeping peacefully in the blankets he’d tucked around her when he got up to open the window. He didn’t think he’d ever tire of seeing her at peace.

The negotiations required to arrange their schedule had been somewhat less peaceful.

He was, after all, here researching a _war_. A whole series of wars, some of which he’d fought in. The region was peaceful, now, but that didn’t make it entirely safe to poke at old wounds.

His initial plan had been for them to make Split their base of operations, and for Lucy to either stay there, or move to Zagreb, if she wanted, when he left for Sarajevo. Split was a city full of history, and Zagreb was lovely, but— maybe it was just as well she visited without him.

When he’d suggested all this, she’d flatly insisted she was coming with him the whole way.

“Ahhh… _no_.”

“Why _not?_ I don’t speak the languages, you’re the one who knows your way around here—”

“You’ll be fine without me. Plenty of people speak English, and I know you can look after yourself.”

“Why don’t you want me to come with you?”

He’d sighed. “It’s not safe enough.”

“What are you talking about? Bosnia, even Kosovo, they’ve been quiet for years.”

“It’s not safe enough _with me!_ ”

His vehemence had made her pause.

“It’s not— as safe with me as you’d be on your own,” he’d amended heavily. “I’m not going to put you in danger on account of my past.”

After extensive discussion, they’d agreed that she’d come with him to Bosnia, and wait in Sarajevo while he conducted his business in Kosovo. Like a good compromise, it left them both unhappy, though he knew she’d be safe enough in Sarajevo.

But what if—

He pushed the more lurid and horrifying terrors out of his mind, and tried not to regret her coming with him. It would be fine. She would be fine.

“Please don’t make me regret this, Garcia,” she’d warned him quietly. “I don’t mean staying in Sarajevo. I mean you going alone.”

He hadn’t pretended to misunderstand. “I’m only going to ask a few questions, Lucy.”

Now, she stirred, interrupting his train of thought. He closed and locked the window, then pulled on his shoes. “I’ll be back with breakfast,” he told her, and got a very sleepy assent.

… the bed, Lucy thought, as Garcia left, was very, very comfortable.

It took her a good ten minutes after the door clicked shut to actually get up, but by the time he came back, she was sitting at the little table, her hair drying, going through his notes. He’d asked her to see if they suggested any other questions that might tie the project together.

She hadn’t been sure how this would go, working together. She had the expertise in writing a history book, but he had the expertise in the wars. And this story was personal to him.

It was a bit delicate, at times. But no more delicate than finding their way through their relationship in those first few weeks in Florida.

As he got out coffee and food, she moved his notes to protect them from grease. Then she dug in to food she couldn’t name, because she remembered about two words of the names he’d patiently told her. But it was delicious, and he’d brought back some of her favorites.

“Plans for today?” he asked after a few minutes. “Before we leave?”

She’d loved Split, but she looked forward to Sarajevo, too. She _wasn’t_ looking forward to staying in Sarajevo while he went on to Kosovo, but—

She made herself focus on the question. “You said there’s an archaeological museum?”

“Yes. I think you’d like it.”

“I wouldn’t mind going there. What about you?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’m content to plan our evening, if that’s still all right with you.”

She nodded. He’d mentioned, back in California, that he wanted to take her some place special. Lucy was intrigued, but when he’d offered to tell her, she’d declined. “Will we be up late?”

His eyes crinkled. “We won’t be _out_ late.”

She looked at him sideways, and couldn’t help smiling.

After she cleaned up, they went to wander one more day; Garcia had no one else to meet here. To simply take the whole day for historical sightseeing, with the man she loved, who’d walked beside her through war and fire and was now very content to walk beside her through old Split…

She sighed.

He looked down at her, and when she smiled, smiled back.

“This was a good idea,” she told him.

He smirked. “I do have them occasionally.”

They stopped at a little side-street bakery, not because they were already hungry again but because they had something he wanted her to try. She noticed a banner, folded in the back, apparently being stored after the holidays. When they went back outside, she asked him about it: “Was that a Christmas tree with a sheaf of wheat? I saw that motif before, but I don’t know what it means.”

“Yeah, it’s Saint— ahh… It’s a Christmas tradition,” he said. “December 13th, you soak the Christmas wheat, and it sprouts and grows tall by Christmas. It’s supposed to symbolize the Nativity.” He paused. “That same day is devoted to the bringing of light into dark places.”

“Oh. Huh.”

“It’s called,” he added, “Saint Lucy’s Day.”

She stared at him, startled and slightly appalled.

He raised his eyebrows, biting back a smirk, and politely offered her his hand.

That night he took her to a restaurant for _peka_ , a seafood dish that cooked so long it had to be ordered in advance. The food, the company, the happiness, and the wine all reminded her of that first night they’d had Rufus back. She thought of that with a pang. She _missed_ him, and Jiya and Wyatt too. Moving down to San Diego shortly after they got back would be a pain, but she’d be glad once they were actually down there.

They left for Sarajevo the next morning. The city delighted her and moved her. There were the obvious historical sites, of course. More than that, its decades and centuries spent as part of various European powers had layered up an amalgam of cultures like she’d never seen, that showed itself in subtler ways— a street name here, a curious trick of architecture there.

And the siege had been almost the first world event to catch her attention as a child. She’d been confused, at first, because a siege was something out of her favorite medieval history book that Mom and Dad had gotten her for Christmas one year. How could it be happening now? It had seemed that it _couldn’t_ be happening for real, and then it had seemed that it _couldn’t_ be going on so long. She’d given part of her allowance to a relief effort at church, gravely believing her quarters would go off to do something important.

So images of a devastated, shelled Sarajevo were vivid in her memories of the ‘90s. Now, she saw it healed, in part, scars still very visible but no longer dominant. Its restoration might have been even more striking than any of its older history.

What was just an observation to her, though, was the lived experience of most of the adults in the city, and even visitors like Garcia. After the months of working on this book with him, she knew something of where and when he’d fought, as a seventeen-year-old on the opposite side of a three-way war from many of his countrymen. But just walking the streets with him, watching him look around almost as if seeing it for the first time, gave her some very faint indication of what it had been like.

They spent the first day exploring together. Garcia spent most of the next day hunting for someone he’d known in the war, coming back in the late afternoon with a closed-off expression. The next day she went with him to the one meeting he had been able to pre-arrange. She knew she probably wouldn’t understand any of it, and she was right— except for when Garcia’s contact glanced at her and said something in an unmistakable tone, and Garcia turned to stone, his notes clearly forgotten under his hands.

He snapped out something in a very different unmistakable tone.

The meeting didn’t last long after that. “What was that about?” she asked him quietly, when they were well away.

He exhaled. “He was being a dick.”

She eyed him.

“If you _really_ want to know, I’ll tell you, but it wasn’t any more than that. I, ah…” He hesitated. “Sometimes the most appropriate response loses you more than it gains.”

She translated this. “I appreciate you not starting a stupid and pointless brawl over my honor. In fact, I expect that.”

He snorted. “It’s been a while since I was entirely a civilian.”

She wondered, not for the first time, if— that really would be enough for him. If this quiet life would grow stale, if he’d want to leave.

The next day, he did leave, for Kosovo.

“Be careful,” she told him quietly. “And come back.”

“That’s the plan.” He stooped to kiss her.

“It’s a good plan. You should stick to it.”

When he was gone, it was hard not to brood and worry. His physical safety was one thing. But there was also his mental well-being, and it was becoming increasingly clear that their four-day idyll in Split was the exception, not the rule. Was _that_ why he’d wanted her to stay there?

It was hard not to brood and worry, but she tried. An old grad school friend, Sara, lived here now. They met for coffee— really, this whole trip was ruining Lucy for American coffee— and then Sara showed her around the old bazaar. Then they visited a few of Sara’s favorite spots, and spent a good hour discussing one of their former professor’s new article on American influences on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

The next day, she went to the genocide museum, and the exhibit on Srebrenica. After that, in a fit of optimism, Lucy decided to visit the Sarajevo Tunnel, only to nearly freeze when she saw the entrance. She forced herself forward anyway, and made it about five feet inside before she panicked and retreated.

She’d seen the museum. That was something, right?

When she got back to their little two-room rented apartment, Garcia was there.

She let out air she hadn’t realized she’d been holding on to, at seeing him back and looking— halfway like himself— and put her arms around him.

He held her tightly, burying his face against her hair.

“Would you…” He hesitated. “Lucy, would you… mind if we leave for Dubrovnik early?”

She pulled back so she could look him in the eye. “I’d be relieved,” she told him frankly.

He exhaled slowly.

She went out and brought back supper for them, proud of her ability to navigate, in all senses of the word, on her own. As they ate, he showed her the results of his trip. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been the interviews going wrong, and as they talked, he slowly unwound.

She tapped one section. “I think you could tie this, what he saw, in to the troop movement record you turned up in that archive. That could really be what the chapter needs to pull it together.”

He shook his head. “It’s… that’s too impersonal. Too, too academic.”

“It— but—” _Too_ academic? With an effort, she closed her mouth on several well-reasoned arguments on balance, on historiography, on the complex weaving of a narrative. “But it _needs_ —”

She tried that whole closing her mouth thing again, with more success this time.

“It needs _something_ ,” he agreed slowly. “But—” He swallowed. “But this is a man’s pain, it deserves a better context.”

 _Yes but_ — no. She was not going to say it. She was not. She would sleep on the idea and consider it for several days and come up with a better-reasoned argument than the instinctive _we don’t_ do _things that way_.

… even though they absolutely did not do things that way.

That night, a loud _crash_ woke her from a dead sleep, followed by another.

She still had her war-time reflexes, but even so, by the time she realized it had come from their front door, Garcia was up and across the room, closing the bedroom door behind him. She followed close on his heels—

He’d somehow barred her in.

Fury and fear warred within her. She looked wildly around for a weapon, grabbed the table lamp, and took up station beside the door, listening—

 _Please don’t let anything happen to him. Please don’t let anything happen to him before_ I _get to him._

The front door opened and closed. Her stomach clenched. Her grip on the lamp tightened.

What felt like an eternity slowly passed. Were those _shots_ in the distance? No, she had to be imagining that.

Had someone followed him from Kosovo?

She heard a key in the lock, then the front door opened and closed again. “It’s me,” Garcia said outside the bedroom door. “It’s okay, I’m alone. It was just some drunks.” She heard what might have been a chair moving, and he opened the door—

“You are never doing that again,” she spat.

He had the temerity to look surprised. “I’ll do that as many times as I need to to keep you safe!”

“No—”

“I _will not_ lose you too, Lucy.” His face hardened. “And you just have to live with that!”

“You _shut_ me _in!_ ”

He looked even more taken aback. “I didn’t think,” he said carefully, “this room was small enough to trigger your, uh, claustrophobia.”

That only fueled her anger. “ _Did_ you think?” she snapped.

“If it had been, we wouldn’t have taken it!”

Damn him for having a reasonable response. “No,” she bit out. “ _You shut me in!”_

“Lucy—”

“ _No!”_

Suddenly, she didn’t know what was saying no to. She had the sudden sensation of being on the edge of a precipice.

He stared at her. He took a deep breath, then another. The seriousness of his expression was visible even in the dim light.

“I’m… still on edge, Lucy,” he said very carefully. “I think— any conversation we have— would be better in the morning.” He watched her. “Is that— all right?”

Her hands shook on the lamp. Hastily, she put it down. “Fine.”

She climbed back into bed and curled up on her side, facing the edge. She could tell from his breathing that he was still awake, too, but neither of them spoke. It was a long time before she slept.

He was in the shower when she woke again. It was early, the light just creeping over the horizon, but she wouldn’t sleep any more. When she came out of the bathroom after her own turn, he put one cup of coffee at each end of the table, and sat down with his legs stretched out.

She realized he wouldn’t speak first.

“Garcia, we’d both die for the other,” she said bluntly. “And we _both_ have to live with that. Can you? Or would you be happier with someone who loves you less?”

His breath left him as if she’d punched him.

“I’m not Lorena,” she added. “You can’t make up for some imagined failing with her, with me.”

He closed his eyes as if he were in pain.

She’d gone much too far, hadn’t she? She swallowed, and waited for—

And waited.

When he finally spoke, his words surprised her. “Why does it bother you more to have me protect you now than it did during the war?”

Her answer came readily: “During the war you trusted my judgement. You never kept me from following you.”

He ran his hand over his face. “I’m not… sure what to say to you, Lucy.” His passion from the night before had drained away, leaving him very tired. “Would we be having this conversation if I’d just told you to stay put?”

Slowly, she shook her head.

He looked up. “And would you have?”

Caught out, she hesitated.

He didn’t look surprised. Or happy. He got up and went to the window, leaning against the sill and watching the rainy street below.

She looked at the resolute set of his shoulders. “Garcia—”

He turned his head so that she’d know he was listening— she would’ve known anyway— but she didn’t know how to follow up that opening.

Finally, she asked, “Are we any less partners now than when we were fighting Rittenhouse?”

That was the critical question, wasn’t it. Had the pressure of the war been the centripetal force holding them together?

He answered without hesitation: “No.”

“Then you don’t leave me behind.”

He turned. It occurred to her that she could drive him into agreeing with her, to this… but at what cost to him?

“All right,” he said heavily.

Hesitant, feeling like she’d crossed a bridge only to find the ground still shifting under her feet, she stood. But he moved first, coming back to the table. He sat on the edge, and she had to look up at him.

“But I _need_ you to be careful.” The words seemed to be dragged out of the depths.

He hesitated, looked down, then continued. “During the war— it was just us. And you’d throw yourself into it because we had no backup. Wyatt and I were the first line of defense, but after us… it was you and Jiya and Rufus because there was _no one_ else. But it’s not like that now, Lucy.”

“I don’t like the idea that I get to come home from the war and you don’t.”

He gestured rather ironically at their surroundings. “I was a soldier long before Rittenhouse. It’s who I am, Lucy. These are the skills I have. It’s a matter of how I choose to use them.”

Carefully, she got up, and sat on the edge of the table beside him— until it rocked ominously. He glanced down, his mouth curving into the first light expression she’d seen since they’d gone to bed. He got up, moved his chair, and turned hers, so they faced each other.

He leaned forward, hands on his knees. “You’ll always be the person whose parents— biological parents both took bullets for her,” he said quietly. “I know that. And I’ll always be—”

He stopped.

“… the person whose wife and child were murdered in the next room,” she said softly.

He closed his eyes, looking, again, etched from stone, and nodded once.

“I know,” she echoed.

He rubbed his hand over his eyes, and opened them again.

“You did teach me to fight,” she reminded him. “I’m not useless.”

“I’ve never thought you were useless.”

“I’m not useless in a _fight_.”

“I know,” he assured her.

“And— because of that, it doesn’t feel right for me to stay back.”

He winced. “Lucy, I was trying to teach you to defend yourself so no one could beat you up, not so you had one more way to beat _yourself_ up.”

All right, it was… true, that though she was far less useless than she’d once been, her abilities in a fight weren’t even in the same category as his. “Fair enough.”

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I was so overbearing last night. I won’t do it again.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. The words had clearly cost him a lot. “Don’t take my choices from me, Garcia—”

“I won’t.”

“— and…” she sighed. “And I’ll be careful with them.”

He closed his eyes. “Thank you.” It came out barely audible.

After a long moment, he opened his eyes. Very hesitant, he reached out and took her hand in his. “And I’m sorry for making us have this conversation.”

“It’s all right.”

His hand, warm and rough, tightened on hers.

She considered her words before she spoke. “You are… you’re generally an unusually thoughtful person,” she said. “It’s one of many things I love about you.”

He studied her for a moment, then leaned forward and very gently kissed her. Lucy felt a little of the tension leave him as she herself relaxed.

He gently pulled away, and let go of her hand. “Do you, uh, still… are we still leaving for Dubrovnik this morning?”

It occurred to her that he could be doubting more than one part of that sentence. “That’s fine with me if it’s still what you want.”

He nodded.

She hesitated. “Will you be all right there,” she asked carefully, “or would you rather go somewhere else?”

It would cost a small fortune to change their flights out of Split, if it were even possible, but they could go _back_ to Split, early, or there were dozens of towns they could visit.

“I’ve been back since the war,” he said after a minute. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not entirely, no.”

He considered her. “I’ll be all right,” he said finally. “If you disagree, we can leave.” His tone had a dark undercurrent.

“I’m not concerned about me, I’m concerned about _you_. You seemed happier in Split than here. I’m not sure where Dubrovnik is going to fall.”

“Probably somewhere in the middle. But, uh…” He cleared his throat. “I saw it very badly damaged during the war. I… enjoy seeing it now.” He paused, then continued, less hesitantly, “And I think you’ll like it.”

“I do want to see it. But—”

“I’ll tell you if…” he trailed off. “If.”

She nodded. “That’s all I’m asking.”

Of all the problems to have as a couple, there were _worse_ ones to have than each being determined to sacrifice for the other’s happiness. That didn’t make it any less of a problem when it _became_ a problem… but still.

“… as long as we’re having uncomfortable conversations, can I ask you something?”

He gestured rather ironically for her to go ahead.

She hesitated. “Why’d you end up in Chechnya in 1994?”

His expression, unexpectedly, eased. “Because I kept a Bosniak commander from torturing two of his Serb prisoners of war,” he said. “He didn’t appreciate a nineteen-year-old upstart Croat interfering in what he saw as his business. And I was sickened by the Bosniak-Croat tensions, anyway. I thought it was asinine.”

“… Oh.”

“So when a, uh, friend of mine, went to Chechnya, I went with him.” He studied her. “Why did you think?”

She shook her head. “I honestly had no idea.”

“It was… easier to go from war to war after that,” he said after a minute. “I knew I was good at it.”

“That’s not all you’re good at, Garcia.”

He eased his tongue over his lip, and nodded once.

“… Dubrovnik?” she said after a minute. “I can get us something we can eat on the road, and we can just… go.”

His look of relief was eloquent. “I’ll go, I have less to pack.”

She shook her head. “I’ll pick something I haven’t had yet, and you can tell me about it.” She stood; he watched quietly as she looked around for her purse, his expression more relaxed than it had been since he’d gotten back to Sarajevo.

Before she left, she bent, and kissed him. He breathed in deeply, cupping the back of her neck.

She pulled back, then couldn’t resist leaning in and kissing him quickly one more time. “Be right back,” she promised.

#

Jiya paused in the kitchen door and watched the small crowd in the living room with satisfaction.

Rufus, Wyatt, and Lucy were locked in what looked like a bloodthirsty game of Dominion. Connor was providing commentary. Stasia was teaching a rather bemused Denise to play Mario Kart. And Flynn—

“Time Team reunion tour, Jiya’s birthday?” Flynn said from his place against the wall. He was doing the same thing as her: just watching.

“I really appreciate you not bringing me a box of zucchini this time,” she said.

He smirked. “Are we watching Voyage Home?”

“It’s still bad Star Trek, and you’re still a heathen with no taste.”

He snorted. He raised his bottle of soda, and she clinked it against her bottle of beer.

“So, I, uh, heard you got the draft of the book finished,” she said after a minute. “You and Lucy.”

He nodded.

“Are you thinking of… writing another, or was this a one-off?”

After a minute, he said, “That’s like asking a woman two weeks postpartum if she’s thinking of more children.”

Her turn to snort. “Fair enough.”

“I think… this was…” He hesitated. “There’s not much else that I know about, and… have the right to tell.”

“Okay, that’s not creepy at all.”

“No. I mean, the war in Nepal, for example. I was there, but that’s not really _my_ story.”

“… I don’t think I knew there _was_ a war in Nepal.”

“You would’ve been four. You can be forgiven for missing it—”

A streak of obscenities exploded out of Stasia, startling everyone except Jiya. She’d lived with Stasia for long enough to know _exactly_ what this was about, even before Stasia said, “I didn’t even _show_ you blue shells yet!”

Rufus snorted. “Did you forget what she does for a living?”

“How’s Grace?” Lucy asked after a minute or so.

Wyatt smiled. “Took her first step the other day. Here—” He made what looked like a random play, then reached for his phone.

“Really? Wyatt, that’s amazing.” Lucy calmly deployed some elaborate combination of cards that made Rufus wince.

“Yeah, Jess was holding on to her, and she tried to come to me…” He was searching through his phone.

“You realize she’s trying to distract you, right?” Rufus said.

Wyatt glanced at the playing area, did a double take, and gave Lucy a disgruntled look. Lucy smiled serenely.

“Oh, so now you get to baby proof the apartment,” Denise said. “Lucky you.”

“ _That_ reminds me.” Wyatt put his hand down and looked at Connor. “If you can invent an electric car and a time machine, you gotta be able to invent childproof cabinet locks that _adults_ can open.”

“There’d definitely be a market,” Stasia muttered.

“Wait, wait wait,” Rufus said. “Are you saying you’re in _Delta Force_ and you can’t open a _childproof lock?_ ”

“Of course I can open a childproof lock.” Wyatt sounded withering. He ruined it by adding: “… but it’s kinda hard to lock _again_ if it’s in pieces on the floor.”

“I said _open_ , not _obliterate_.”

“I’d like to see you do any better, _Doctor_ Carlin.”

Rufus smiled. Jiya did, too.

Connor had again baked a cake, his birthday present to her. Jiya had decided in advance that they’d skip the candles and the singing, but these dorks her friends had, _somehow_ , missed the memo. Or _ignored_ the memo.

Just like last year, she pretended to suffer through it. But she couldn’t help noticing how much fuller and more vibrant the song sounded, with a few more voices.

“So,” Jiya said, after some quiet moments of appreciative chewing. “How many geniuses does it take to figure out which birthday of mine this actually is?”

“Twenty-nine.” Rufus scooped more ice cream onto his plate. “This would’ve been your twenty-sixth, and you spent three years in the 1880s.”

“Depends,” Connor said. “How many birthdays did you have in the past?”

“If you think about it,” Flynn said, “unless you spent an exact multiple of three hundred and sixty five days there, this isn’t even your birthday any more.”

She pointed her fork at him. “No one likes a spoilsport.”

“You know, this reminds me of the plot of Pirates of Penzance,” Connor added.

“Yeah, I’m sure Gilbert and Sullivan were thinking of time travel when they wrote it,” Rufus muttered.

They cleared the table and Jiya opened her presents. Denise had knitted her a sunny yellow hat, with some kind of fancy pattern thingy at the edge. From Lucy, Jiya got a biography of Grace Hopper; from Stasia, a gift card for her Steam account; from Wyatt, a pair of Star Trek novels.

“I went to the bookstore, found a guy who knew what he was talking about, and asked him to recommend the ones with the most Klingons,” Wyatt added.

Jiya laughed. “Thanks.”

Flynn gave her a large humpback whale keychain.

She sighed. “… thanks, Flynn.”

“Press on its fluke.”

She eyed him, and did. The keychain made a loud whale noise.

She looked at him. He gave her a toothy shit-eating grin.

Rufus had given her her present earlier, and it was hanging in their bedroom.

“It’s based on the Mandelbrot set,” Jiya said, taking it down so Lucy could see it. “It’s a set of complex numbers that follows the rule—”

Lucy looked at her.

“… uh, it basically repeats. Infinitely. On any scale.”

Lucy frowned, and leaned the print against the wall, backing up as far as she could. Then she looked at it at arms-length. Then she looked at it inches from her face.

Jiya glanced into the other room. Stasia and Flynn were chatting in Russian as they washed all the dishes, which, in theory, Jiya appreciated enormously… but was it really a good idea to let the two worst trolls she knew get acquainted?

“… _huh_ ,” Lucy said finally.

“Pretty cool, right? Oh— hang on.” Connor was leaving. Jiya went out to the living room.

“Happy birthday, Jiya,” he told her, giving her a hug. “I’ll see you Monday.”

“Hey. Don’t forget your party favor.” She opened the cabinet.

He frowned. Then she carefully handed the favor in question to him, and he let out a shout of delighted laughter.

The others looked at each other, totally confused by why she’d just given Connor a baby cactus, in a Mason jar painted with suns. Oddly enough, though, no one complained that _they_ hadn’t gotten one.

Jiya got another present on Monday, when she and Rufus and some of the others donned hard hats and safety glasses and went out to a community center. They’d decided that all their initial real-world prototype testing would happen with local non-profits. They’d handle the install and maintenance, any trouble-shooting, and takedown if necessary, which it hopefully wouldn’t be. So, the non-profits got free electricity; MaSun Industries—

She sighed.

— MaSun industries got critical data, and good PR.

She and Venkatesh supervised the install while Connor and Rufus took care of the connections inside. The press was eating up the idea of Connor Mason getting his hands dirty again, turning it into a triumphant comeback story, and Connor was eating _that_ up. But today, it was just them and the workers, and the community center manager, and a volunteer, and a few curious kids.

It was a hot day, and she was grateful for the cold drinks the manager offered when they climbed off the roof. She wiped her face, and stood next to Rufus. Connor made the last connection, the monitoring system started registering kilowatts, and they all cheered.

Jiya took out her phone and made some notes for the next installations. Some of what she’d noticed was particular to this site, where they were field-testing the first of her printed solar panels, but some would help them in two weeks, when they mounted the perovskite prototypes on top of a church.

“You know?” Rufus said. “It’s _really_ nice to be saving the world without anyone shooting at us.”

Jiya snorted, and leaned against him. Their hard hats clunked.

#

She really liked San Diego.

When she’d taken this job, she’d only been thinking of it as a place that was not the Bay Area, a place free of the weight of memory. But now, as she sat with Denise on the back patio the day after Jiya’s birthday party, she found herself listing a bunch of things she liked. The warmth. The sunshine. Her new department, which took its work just as seriously as Stanford did, while managing to take _itself_ somewhat less pretentiously seriously. “I’m still meeting people,” she added. “It’ll be a while before I’m not the new girl any more. But I feel a lot less like I’m drowning in chum-infested waters, here.”

“Well, that’s… good,” Denise said dryly.

And the house— if everything that had happened had tarnished and complicated her feelings about Mom’s house, being there with Garcia had helped redeem it. But she had a lot of memories, there, and she hadn’t anticipated what a _relief_ it would be to start over, together, someplace new. Someplace _theirs_.

It honestly wasn’t weird that they’d bought a house _together_. It was weird that they’d _bought a house_. But it was a good weird.

“How about you?” Lucy added. “Tell me about Michelle and Mark and Olivia.”

Denise’s expression softened a bit. “They’re doing well. It was a little rough, at first, trying to go back to normal, but… I think we’re okay.” She looked relieved, and justifiably proud of her family’s resilience.

Lucy smiled.

Denise’s own smile turned wry. “Mark’s looking at colleges. I’m not sure when that happened, and I’m still not convinced a time machine wasn’t involved.”

Lucy laughed. “Does he know what he’s looking for?”

“He’s talking about some kind of engineering, and English, which isn’t a combination _I_ would have expected, but… If he knows what he wants, good for him. I sure didn’t when I was his age.”

“And Olivia?”

“I’m a little worried about her, starting middle school,” Denise admitted. “Hiding out from Rittenhouse was hard on her, and she still has nightmares sometimes.”

Lucy winced in sympathy. “But she has two tough moms to see her through it.”

“And Michelle…” Denise hesitated, making Lucy’s heart sink a little. “She had some problems at work over such a long absence. Someone suggested ‘a matter of national security’ was code for ‘on vacation with her federal agent wife.’”

“Are you _kidding_ me.”

“Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.”

“I’m glad,” Lucy said after a minute. “I’m glad things are, um, working out.”

“And for you, too.” Denise gave her an I’m-curious-but-not-going-to-pry look that had clearly been honed during years in law enforcement. “You seem pretty happy here.”

Lucy smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I think I am.” She hesitated. “When we were in the thick of it,” she admitted after a minute, “I couldn’t picture— any kind of future. Let alone this one.”

She felt guilty, sometimes, over being so happy. After all, she could’ve ended the war even more cleanly and permanently by going after David Rittenhouse. But she was glad Rufus and Garcia had stopped her, and _that_ was what she felt guilty about.

“I know,” Denise said. “I worried about all of you. Especially after Rufus died.”

Lucy winced. “Yeah, we were a bit of a mess.”

“But look at all of you now,” Denise said, with a smile.

Lucy and Garcia settled in to a routine faster, and more comfortably, than Lucy had expected. Though several of her new colleagues worked remotely for much of the summer, she diligently went to campus nearly every weekday, to be collegial and visible. Prepping one new class for the upcoming semester kept her busy, and when she needed a break, she wrote about labor in the labor movement and felt very virtuous.

Garcia was putting together a book proposal to send to publishers, with lots of swearing and acerbic comments on her field. He was also doing still contract work for Homeland Security, usually at their local office. He’d gone back to San Francisco once to consult with Denise face-to-face— Lucy went with him to see Ethan— and Denise had been in town for Jiya’s birthday for the same reason.

And every week, almost always more than once, they had dinner with the team. Usually Rufus and Jiya hosted one night and she and Garcia hosted another, because Wyatt had an infant at home. Sometimes someone cooked, sometimes they did potluck, and sometimes they worked on systematically sampling all of San Diego’s takeout.

Lucy’s fears that Garcia would find a life like this not enough came less frequently. It almost hurt to watch him settle down, though. She’d come to love him when they were both bowed by the weight of the war; as he shed that weight now, she saw more and more clearly the man he must’ve been the morning of July 18th, 2014. It hurt to think of him losing everything in an instant. It hurt to think of how quickly it could be taken away from them now.

“… Dr. Preston? Lucy?”

She snapped out of a reverie watching Garcia selecting oranges in the produce department. It was one of her new colleagues. Lucy panicked for a second before she put a name to the face: Beth Collins, office one floor down, specialized in diaspora history, this semester teaching intro to African American history and a grad seminar in non-violent resistance. “Yes, um, hi,” Lucy said, then mentally kicked herself for being so awkward. “I’m sorry, I was zoning out.”

“We’ve all been there,” Beth assured her.

Garcia turned and put the oranges in the cart. Lucy was positive he’d seen Beth coming before she had. She wasn’t— sure if he actually wanted to be introduced. Such a mundane thing, so mundane it felt very strange. But considering they were standing over the same cart, it was quite clear they were together. “This is my partner, Garcia.”

“I’m Beth.” She held out her hand and openly looked him over, visibly curious. “Are you, uh… how do you like it here? Were you in the Bay Area with Lucy?”

“Ah… yes. It’s, uh… nice here,” Garcia said. “Very…” He hesitated. “Warm,” he finished.

“… do you also teach?”

“Uh,” Garcia said, “no.”

Lucy loved Garcia’s typical considerateness. But _considerate_ and _has_ _social skills_ were not, in fact, the same thing.

“We’re still settling in,” he added, sounding a bit more like a normal human. “It was a bit of a whirlwind move.”

Lucy saw Beth’s gaze flick over Garcia. Nothing to prompt Lucy to feel awkward; rather, it was a hot day, and Garcia was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The scar on his neck from their very first meeting was visible, as was a pair of knife scars on his forearms. Plus, you know, his general… everything.

“Pardon my curiosity,” Beth said, “but where did you two meet?”

Their gazes met. Garcia’s expression suggested that he would politely defer to her in this, with her colleague…

… and also that he was deriving unholy amusement from doing so.

“At a… Hindenburg exhibit,” Lucy said, aware she was not really outperforming Garcia in the normal human department right now. “I looked up, and… there he was.”

Garcia looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh or choke.

“You’re a history buff, then?” Beth looked pleased to have solved the mystery of the two of them. Lucy was so thoroughly used to having him beside her that she forgot how much he looked and moved like a soldier, while she definitely did not.

“Yes,” Garcia said. “That’s, ah, what brought Lucy and I together.”

Lucy cleared her throat. “How’s the summer treating you? You were taking that research trip out to Maryland, right?”

“Good memory,” Beth said. “It was surprisingly productive. One of those rare times when reality lives up to expectation. Usually it’s more like you get out there and the archivist suddenly can’t find the documents you’ve been emailing back and forth about for two months, or they’ve had a medical emergency, or they’ve cut the number of boxes you can request a day in half, or…”

Lucy didn’t have to fake her rueful laugh. “Yep. I’m glad this one went well.”

“How about you? Remind me what you’re teaching this quarter?”

“Intro to American history 1, and gender of science in the American research enterprise.”

“Oh, right. One of my students is taking that. She’s very excited.”

“Mmm. It’s always great to have students enthusiastic to be guinea pigs.”

A short pause. “I, uh, don’t want to keep you too long,” Beth said. “I see you have ice cream in the cart. I’ll see you at—”

“Right. It was, uh, good to talk to you. I appreciate you stopping,” Lucy added, and if it was awkward, it was also heartfelt.

She carefully did not look at Garcia as they finished shopping, checked out, loaded the car, and left the parking lot. Only when she was absolutely positive Beth could no longer see them did she glance sideways at him and risk laughing.

“Getting our cover stories straight has never been our forte, has it?” Suppressed laughter was audible in his own voice.

“Right, here’s our story,” she said after a minute or two. “We literally ran into each other at the Hindenburg exhibit. In… we’ll look one up. You bumped into me, we got into an argument about that and then about the factual content of the exhibit, we went to a bar for a drink, and the rest was… well, history.”

He snorted.

“I mean, considering that—”

“— that we actually met in 1937 and I was holding you at gunpoint, yes, this version is preferable for public consumption.”

She glanced at him again. “That feels so long ago.”

“Well, it _was_ eighty-one years.”

She just looked at him.

The quarter began in its usual whirlwind. Being at a new institution made it more stressful day-to-day; having tenure made it less existentially stressful. She came home one afternoon to find Garcia sitting in the living room with a man who looked familiar, though Lucy knew they’d never met.

Garcia looked up. “Ah. Uh, Lucy, I want you to meet my brother Gabriel… Gabriel, this is Lucy.”

Garcia hadn’t said anything in advance, which told her he must have been as startled as she was. She scrambled to remember what she’d gleaned about Gabriel from Garcia’s file.

“Hello.” Lucy shook hands with Gabriel, who looked a lot like Garcia in his features but was much shorter and more lightly built. His hair was dark, but speckled with grey. “I’ve, uh… heard a lot about you.” That was… true, right?

“I didn’t expect to get to meet you, this is a pleasant surprise,” she added. She glanced at Garcia. His face was unreadable.

“I was in town on business,” Gabriel explained. His accent was solidly American. “I knew Garcia had, uh, wound up here, and I thought I’d— come by.”

Lucy escaped temporarily to the kitchen to get drinks. When she got back, Gabriel was describing something in Paris. She slipped off her shoes, pulled up the oversized ottoman, and tucked her feet up beside her.

It took her a minute or two to realize how skillfully Garcia was keeping the conversation going, saying just the right things and letting Gabriel fill in the blanks. She’d seen him do it in the past, and it must’ve been an invaluable skill to have at the NSA.

She pitched in: she could ask questions a lot more obviously than Garcia could, given she and Gabriel were never supposed to have met. “You know, Garcia took me to Croatia a few months ago,” she said after a while. “When he was traveling on, um, business.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, we, uh, we stayed in Split, and then in Dubrovnik… that’s where you guys grew up, right?”

Gabriel nodded, but didn’t give any more details. “What kind of business? Or is it classified?” he added wryly.

“Lucy and I are, uh, writing a book,” Garcia said.

“Mostly him,” she clarified, to give credit where it was due.

“On the Yugoslav Wars. I was… tying up some loose ends.”

“Well, you certainly have the expertise in that field.” Gabriel smiled at Garcia. “I still haven’t forgotten how, when you went off to war that first time, you somehow managed to get me a letter nearly every damned week.”

Garcia rubbed his hand over his face. “It was, uh… it was… important.” He cleared his throat. “We also made a side trip to, uh, to Sarajevo.”

Lucy helpfully picked up that conversational thread and ran with it, finally winding up with an inviting, “I know Garcia’s said you’ve traveled extensively…”

“I’ve bopped around Europe for most of my adult life. Not sure that really counts as _extensively_ to a man who’s visited every continent besides Antarctica,” Gabriel said with a wry smile.

“Well, I’ve lived in California nearly all _my_ life, so it’s certainly extensive to me.”

“You’re a writer?” Gabriel asked.

“I’m a history professor.”

“UCSD?”

Lucy nodded.

“You know, he probably hasn’t told you, but Garcia used to be crazy about being a history professor when he grew up.”

“Really?” Lucy glanced at Garcia.

“Yeah, from when he was about five until he was maybe ten. He’d read any old thing he could get his hands on.”

Garcia looked abashed.

“Those letters he sent, they were always full of some kind of ancient ruins this or local folk tale that,” Gabriel added.

“I… can definitely see that.”

Gabriel frowned. “My phone’s dead; do you have the time?”

Lucy showed him her own phone.

“Thanks.”

“How long are you staying?” Lucy asked, hoping he would say something like _I should’ve gone ten minutes ago_ and not bring up the question of dinner.

“That… depends.” He smiled at her. “Tell me about your work. What do you study?”

Lucy managed to comprehensively outline the book she was working on in under five minutes. “… I also have something of a soft spot for history’s forgotten heroes,” she admitted. “That doesn’t always go over too well in academic circles, but… I’m working on sneaking it in there.”

“That sounds fascinating.” Gabriel made it sound sincere, if a little distant.

Then he glanced at Garcia. “You know, when Homeland Security first asked me about time travel,” he said conversationally, “I thought they were pranking me, but given that you clearly don’t know me, I’m going to have to rethink that.”

The bottom fell out of Lucy’s stomach. She stared. Garcia, too, seemed speechless for once.

“You never wanted to be a historian, Garcia,” Gabriel said, very gently. “You were always mad to be a cowboy. And… I think I heard from you _once_ between when you ran away, and when the siege began.”

Gabriel glanced at Lucy. “And given that Lucy’s lock screen includes the man who came to the house that day in 1969, I’m guessing this isn’t news to her, either.”

… Which was worse? The poorly concealed oh-shit in Garcia’s expression, or the disappointment in Gabriel’s?

He turned to her. “Oh, come on,” he said a little wryly. He seemed to find it easier to talk to her than his brother. “You knew he had to get his brains from _somewhere_. Did you really think it was Asher Flynn?”

She swallowed. “Did someone send you?”

How foolish of them to think the war was past. If Gabriel— Jessica—

Whatever this was, it wasn’t personal to her like it was to Garcia. She would protect him from this fresh new horror, or—

Gabriel looked confused. Then his expression relaxed. “You haven’t had an easy time of it, have you?”

She stared at him.

“No one sent me,” he said, still gentle. “I had no idea anything was— not as I expected, until I came here. Though I did wonder… well, about a lot of things.”

“Homeland Security came to talk to you after I was accused of murdering Lorena and Iris?” Garcia finally found his voice, but it was rough, clipped, cold.

“After… after that, first it was the NSA, then it was the CIA.” Gabriel sounded wry. “I suspect I was under surveillance for quite some time. Homeland Security didn’t turn up until late 2016.” He stopped smiling. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “You— I can’t believe I’m saying this— time traveled, and you came back, and the world was different than when you left?”

Garcia hesitated.

“You really have no idea who I am, do you?” Gabriel sounded stunned, and pained. “What was the world you left like? Have we— have we ever even met?”

Garcia’s expression was bleak.

“We haven’t,” Gabriel guessed. His face changed. “… I was dead, wasn’t I. That’s why— that was _you_ , that day. Not Mom’s brother.”

Garcia frowned. “She didn’t have a brother.”

“Clearly not.” Gabriel looked at Garcia. After a moment, he said, “… you really don’t know me?”

The slight tremor in his voice was heartbreaking.

Garcia shook his head once. “I replaced the man that… knew you.” He hesitated. “It… always happens, like that. I would have had to die in the past to, uh… not.” He licked his lip.

Gabriel looked between the two of them.

“Look— Gabriel—” Garcia’s voice was very rough now. He leaned forward. “I’m— sorry he’s gone. It’s my fault.” His hand opened and closed. “You were dead when I was growing up,” he blurted out. “I always regretted that. I always wanted to know you. But— you knew a man with my face, and if it would be too hard to— to get to know _me_ , I…” He cleared his throat. “I understand.”

Gabriel stared back at him, tears in his eyes. “Garcia,” he said gently. “You’re my _brother_.”

Garcia had tears in his own eyes. Lucy stood abruptly. “I’m going to start dinner,” she said. “You _are_ staying, right.”

Oh, had she forgotten to make that a question? Oops.

When she returned, after giving them some privacy, Gabriel was saying, “Can you tell me about your, um… version of reality?”

Garcia winced. “Sure. Ah.” He cleared his throat. “I was born in Dubrovnik…”

Gabriel nodded.

“Mom, uh… died in 1980. Cancer. And I went to live with Baka Flynn in the hinterlands. She, uh… she died in ’86 of heart failure, and I went back to Dubrovnik with— my father.”

“ _Alone?_ ” Gabriel sounded appalled.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Garcia tried to tell him. “I was, uh, bigger then, and…”

“Uh, anyway,” Garcia continued after a loud silent moment, “I stayed until 1990, then joined the, uh, one of the militias. The war broke out the next year, and uh… I was fighting for quite a while.”

He rubbed his hand over his face. “I met Lorena late in 2006,” he said. “While I was recovering from Somalia. We were… married in 2007. I started my company, to support us without me going off to war all the time. Iris was born in 2009. I made the mistake of letting the NSA recruit me in 2010, God damn them. And…” He swallowed. “They were killed in 2014.”

“I’m so sorry,” his brother said quietly.

Garcia closed his eyes, struggling for control. “Thank you.” He hesitated. “It gets, uh, complicated from here, but basically, I… we fought a war against the bastards that killed Lorena and Iris. That’s where I met Lucy, that’s how the… time travel happened. And we won.”

After a minute, he opened his eyes again. “What about your timeline?”

“We moved to Dubrovnik in ’73,” Gabriel said after a minute. “Mom met Asher…” His facial expression made it clear what he thought of that. “They got married, you came along in ’75, Mom died in ’81.”

Lucy saw Garcia register that one.

“I had one year left of gymnasium. Asher ‘let’ me stay to finish. Said he was honoring Mom’s memory.” Gabriel’s mouth twisted with disgust and contempt. “You went to Baka Flynn in ’82, when I went to university in Zagreb. She died around the time I graduated. You came back to Dubrovnik, I found work and moved back in—”

“Into that _hellhole?_ ” was what burst out of Garcia. “Dear God, why?”

When he heard what he’d just said, his face went solemn and a little defiant. He looked down.

Gabriel looked at him, sad and affectionate. “For you,” he said, as if explaining the color of the sky.

Garcia’s head snapped up. He scrutinized Gabriel with something in between suspicion and desperation.

“To protect you,” Gabriel added gently. “Like I protected Mom.”

Garcia’s mouth was a grim line, but his eyes were moved and sad. He looked stunned, despairing, overwhelmed. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and looked away, eyes wet. “Why the hell did he let you move back in?”

“Money.”

Garcia made a sardonic face.

“You ran away in ’90. Asher blamed me and threw me out. When open war broke out, I left Croatia. I came back to the States, and stayed with our grandparents while I did a master’s. Uh… I got married, got divorced, moved to Amsterdam, my job transferred me to Paris, and I’ve been there since.”

Garcia took a deep breath. He opened his mouth to say something, but absolutely nothing came out.

Lucy went to check on dinner.

Gabriel stayed late into the evening. Lucy found herself liking him a lot. He was, in many senses, a gentler version of Garcia, in a way that didn’t at all keep him from being his own person. He had fewer sharp edges, a more subtle but no less fully formed sense of sardonicism. Garcia might have turned out a lot like him if he hadn’t gone to war at 15. Or if, perhaps, he’d been raised by a different man.

She watched this reunion, and she couldn’t help thinking— it wasn’t the same, of course. But she still lingered in the kitchen over the dishes, and when she was done, she slipped out to their patio, to sit on the edge.

She heard the door open behind her a few minutes later. “I’m fine,” she said. “Go spend time with your brother.”

“He’s in the bathroom,” Gabriel said a little dryly. “I draw the line there.”

Lucy snorted.

He came and hesitantly sat down beside her. “I know we just met, but I wanted to check that you were all right.”

Something told Lucy he would not be convinced by a repetition of _fine_ any more than Garcia usually was. “I just came out here to think about my sister.”

He was quiet. “Is she…”

“I lost her in the war.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Would it be easier if Garcia and I went out somewhere else?”

Lucy shook her head. “No. I’m glad you’re here with him.”

The door opened behind them again. Lucy turned and looked at Garcia.

He looked thoughtful. “Uh, Gabriel, could I have a word with Lucy?” he said after a minute.

Gabriel’s eyebrows went up, but he stood.

“I’ll be right in,” Garcia added. He went and sat in the spot his brother had just vacated, studying her. “Are you all right?”

“I will be.”

“The last time you slipped out of a celebratory reunion, I found you, uh, plotting something really drastic.”

She shook her head. “I’m not plotting.” All that was done now. She could never get Amy back.

It occurred to her that if she’d gone back in time and killed David Rittenhouse, Amy still would never have been born.

She looked up at him. “I just need a few minutes.”

He did not pretend confusion. “All right,” he said quietly. He kissed her very gently, and stood again.

“I’m happy for you,” she told him, and hoped that he knew her well enough to understand that her feelings were complex, not that she was shoving anything under the rug.

“Thank you, Lucy,” he told her quietly.

A thought occurred to Lucy that night, after Gabriel was gone. They’d offered him the spare room, but his stuff was at his hotel and he had to leave early in the morning. “Garcia?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated. She really, really did not want to say this, but she had to. “Is it possible…”

“That he’s Rittenhouse?”

She nodded.

“Agent Christopher checked, when she assigned him some security after we left Florida. She had me look over her analysis as well.”

Lucy relaxed.

Garcia, she noticed after a little while, was not relaxing. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, deep lines on his face.

She sat beside him.

When he didn’t speak, she asked, quietly, “What is it, Garcia?”

She could think of a number of ways meeting his brother could have put that look on his face, or she would have guessed and spared him having to tell her.

He sighed. He looked down. “My mother.”

He fell silent again, so this time she did guess. “… her death date?”

One short nod.

She put her hand on his shoulder and turned him to face her. Reluctantly, he made eye contact.

“You have no idea what happened,” Lucy told him. “You were _six_. There is no _possible_ justification for you to blame yourself for anything from back then.”

“Maybe it wasn’t anything I did.” He spoke, as he sometimes did, like the words were being dragged out of him. “Maybe it was what she had to live for.”

“I never met your mother, but I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit.”

“She was _tired_ , Lucy.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “She was tired and sad, already, before she got sick. She didn’t have the strength to fight—” His voice broke. He wiped his eyes roughly.

“She lost her husband and her son,” Lucy said. “That’s enough to wear anyone down. And if she had more strength in this timeline, Garcia? It’s because _you_ went back _and saved her son_.”

He looked at her.

She leaned forward and put her arms around him. He shuddered, resting his head against hers, as she stroked up and down his back.

“Garcia,” she whispered. “Garcia, love.”

He exhaled slowly. When he finally pulled away, his eyes were wet.

“I’m really glad you met him,” she told him.

Garcia managed a smile. “Apparently,” he said, “when we were young, he would delight in pointing out to me that the Croatian word for brother is _brat_ , and I would delight in correcting his pronunciation.”

Lucy snorted.

Now that this was their life, it frightened her to think back to the war and remember how close she’d come to giving up hope… and everything else. Did you ever realize how close you’d been to the precipice, before you stepped back?

She’d come so close. Yet he’d held the line between her and total despair. And she’d done the same for him.

She knew it wouldn’t always be like this happy, harmonious summer. She suspected their ghosts and their past would trouble them again, sooner than later. It would come and go in waves for the rest of their lives.

And it did.

There was Amy’s birthday, which last year had gotten lost in the end of the war. Lucy knew, intellectually, that if Garcia had never changed the Hindenburg disaster, she never would have found out the truth about her parents. She didn’t know how São Paulo Lucy had found out, but it might have been even less gentle.

But the pain of Amy’s absence still _ached_. As did knowing she was, inexorably, moving on.

She remembered what Wyatt had once said, about not knowing how to mark his anniversary with Jessica. About the balance between grieving her and celebrating her life. Lucy didn’t know what to do, either. Amy deserved better than to be simply fuel for Lucy’s grief, and yet, Lucy needed to grieve.

The day before Amy’s birthday, Lucy clicked on a link to a sociology podcast one of the other associate professors, Sela, had sent her. She only meant to look at the website and listen to a minute or two. She listened for fifteen minutes and was nearly late to teach. That evening, when Lucy went back to download the next four episodes, she saw that the creator was crowdsourcing donations to cover unexpected medical bills. Lucy thought dark thoughts about the state of American healthcare, and then covered the remaining balance. She put her name down as Amy Preston.

The next evening, Lucy ended up curling up quietly on the couch with a blanket and a tissue box, and watching a movie she and Amy had always loved. Garcia let her be, but she knew, without having to check, that he was within earshot.

Then there was the weekend trip Garcia decided to take to the cemetery where Lorena and Iris were buried. “Do you want company?” Lucy asked.

The lines on his face deepened. He touched his tongue to his lip.

She stood directly in front of him. “Remember when I first moved in with you,” she said quietly, “and I asked you to tell me if you wanted me to go, because if you promised to be honest I could trust you the rest of the time?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Finally he said, “I’d rather go alone.” It came out guttural. “You— you didn’t know them.”

“Okay,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

He came back with his face stony, his expression old. When she greeted him, kissed him, cupped his face, she could tell how far away his thoughts were.

“Garcia?” she asked quietly.

He looked up slowly, but his face was still deeply lined. “It’s all right, Lucy.”

In the way he did not relax, she could tell he wanted to be alone. Once upon a time that would have triggered all her worst insecurities, but she knew now this wasn’t about her.

She made a fresh pot of tea and put a mug in his hand as he sat motionless at the table. Then she rested her hands on his shoulders a moment, and went back to what she’d been doing.

It wasn’t long before he came quietly into the office, and stretched out on the couch behind her, the one from her mother’s living room. He didn’t say anything; she thought he was sleeping. But when they both got up again, the rigidity was gone from his expression.

One evening, he took her out to dinner, to a quiet place with good wine and a thorough menu. “Is there an occasion?” she asked, when they’d placed their orders.

After a minute, he said, “We don’t have an anniversary, and I thought… you might enjoy the kinds of things people do on their anniversaries.”

She’d actually never thought about that before. What date _could_ they choose? The day he’d come to her mother’s house was far too late to be the beginning. The day they’d first kissed was not a totally happy memory. The morning she’d first realized she might love him, after he’d wept for his dead family, was… well, obviously fraught. The day she’d moved into his room had just been… becoming roommates. Then.

“If you, ah, don’t—” he began.

She shook her head, and raised her glass. “To our movable anniversary.”

He smiled, and they clinked glasses.

#

Once the police released the scene, it didn’t actually take Jiya and Venkatesh very long to sweep up the glass. The bricks had been taken away as evidence. Luckily, they’d missed anything vital.

“So, uh,” Venkatesh began. He was unusually quiet and pale that morning.

Right. The war had skewed her ideas of normal.

“Don’t worry about it too much,” she suggested. “I don’t think they were trying to break anything. They just wanted attention.”

He looked sideways at her. “Is it a cheap shot to say, ‘You mean _besides_ the windows?’”

Jiya snorted.

“You know, when I first told my parents I wanted to study in the United States,” he added, “my mom, she was weeping, she was like, ‘America’s so violent, they shoot so many people there.’ And I told her, Mom, no, I want to go to California, it doesn’t happen like that there.” He glanced sideways at her. “I know, I know. I was naive.”

“I mean, yeah, but… nobody’s getting shot, okay?” she said, hoping like hell she wasn’t wrong. “Connor’s bringing in some security. And anti-GMO activists or whatever aren’t normally violent. They just want to make a stir.”

“Is anything normal any more?” Venkatesh muttered as he helped her carefully tape up the box of shards.

Getting bricks through their windows certainly wasn’t. Connor had gone on a talk show about renewable energy, and the obligate paid skeptic had said, “But if you go into production at the rates you’re proposing, it won’t be long before we run out of the rare earth elements that you need. Renewable energy is a great supplement to the grid, but—”

They’d all groaned at that, watching together at Dana’s house. Mika had thrown popcorn at the TV, and Taylor had marked off the “but lithium, eleventy” square on their Fossil Fuel Concern Troll bingo card and won.

“Your talking points are a few years out of date, aren’t they?” Connor had suggested, with the sly obnoxious smirk that showed exactly why he went on these shows. “The Marlin cell uses less lithium than any other PV cell on the market, and, it’s about 97% reusable once it degrades past usability. We’re actively working towards a closed loop process.”

The skeptic scoffed. “Sure, with massive energy inputs—”

“Have you forgotten I’m running a business here?” Connor had said. “Low temperatures, quick separations, and we’re looking at special bacteria to do some bioremediation and boost that number even higher.”

Which, considering this _was_ California, had led directly to some radical fringe anti-GMO group putting out a badly punctuated press release about how Connor Mason, “disgraced ex-tech mogul,” was going to kill them all with untested genetic engineering, and then to two bricks through their windows sometime last night.

They finished securing the box. “Have you ever… you know,” Venkatesh began.

 _Have you ever… you know_ meant a lot of different things in different circumstances. “Have I ever what?”

“Have you ever… seen a shooting?”

Jiya closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I have,” she said. “And I’m not going to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry. That was a stupid question, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Yeah, it was. Let’s drop it and no hard feelings, okay?”

She let him take the box out, and wandered over to where Rufus was sitting in front of a console. She rested her hands on his shoulders and pressed her lips gently against the top of his head. They weren’t usually super demonstrative at work, but the others certainly knew they were _married_. And right now, Jiya just wanted to remind herself that he was _there_.

“Hey,” he said softly.

“Hey.” She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of his hair.

“You okay?”

“Mm-hmm.” She straightened up, and got on with her own work.

“Oh my God,” Mika said a while later.

Jiya and Taylor turned quickly. He was staring at—

“ _That’s_ who Connor’s hiring for security?”

“As a consultant, hopefully,” Jiya said. “If he agrees, then he’ll check out our vulnerabilities, and take care of hiring an actual security team.”

Mika was still staring. Jiya had to admit, wearing all black like that, staring intently around as he and Connor talked, Flynn looked pretty… intense.

“He is the only person who’s ever gotten through my security,” Connor had said, during their emergency business meeting that morning.

“And Rittenhouse,” Rufus had muttered.

“I hope you’re not suggesting we hire _them_.”

“He did have help from Anthony,” she’d pointed out.

“True, but he’s still terrifyingly competent and he has a disturbingly creative mind. I mean, we can’t exactly say he’d do a _bad_ job.”

No; if he weren’t interested, he’d just turn the job down. If he took it— he wouldn’t phone it in.

He certainly looked like he was considering it, now studying the ceiling with his hands on his hips. Then he and Connor went outside, and Jiya went back to her work.

“Uh… Jiya?” Taylor said after a while. “Is your bag making… whale noises…? Maybe I’m hearing things, I just thought—”

“Damn it, Flynn,” she muttered, and reached for her bag to turn the damn keychain off. Again.

The thing was, it was actually a really convenient keychain because it was so big she could easily find it in her bag. NSA-trained troll that he was, she wouldn’t have put it past him to have _planned_ that. She kept forgetting to order another big keychain, and every time she thought about taking the batteries out, she was at home, where they didn’t have the special finicky screwdriver that it apparently took.

She wouldn’t have put it past him to have planned that _either_.

But this time— She got up and started looking through the tool drawers. Yes, they had the right screwdriver. She took great satisfaction in performing an emergency batteryectomy.

“Probably a good idea before next week,” Rufus commented, passing by as she started to stitch the patient up. Well, screw the patient up— no, that didn’t sound right.

“‘Cause sometimes it doesn’t sound like a whale so much as a demonic hell spawn, and I’m not sure how the TSA would take that,” he added.

Taylor looked at Jiya. “What’s next week?”

“We’re flying back to San Francisco for Rufus’s brother’s graduation.”

Jiya was really happy for Kevin, but his graduation was a relief beyond that. Hiding out in a bunker in Wyoming had interrupted his plans; now he was done. Every milestone like that, every part of life restored to normality, was… reassuring.

“High school or college?” Taylor asked.

“College.”

“Nice. I hope y’all have a good time,” Taylor said, in their soft Southern drawl.

“Trouble with your keychain, Jiya?”

She _jumped_. God. Clearly Flynn’s skills hadn’t eroded since the end of the war. He wasn’t openly smirking down at her, but she knew him well enough now to tell he was amused.

“No,” she said. “Just upgrading it.” She gave him a pointed look.

Flynn made a non-committal noise and kept going, prowling through the assembly line. Mika poked his head over his desk, eyes wide. “Do you _know_ him?”

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “Rufus and I used to, uh… we’re friends with him and his… girlfriend.”

“… oh.” Mika deflated a little, and went back to his work.

A while later, Rufus walked behind her chair, and put his hand on her shoulder. “I gotta say,” he said, in a voice only she could hear, “putting Flynn in charge of keeping things from being damaged still feels kinda like putting the Hulk in charge of making sure things don’t get smashed.”

Jiya snorted. Sure, Flynn could absolutely be as single-minded in protecting something in going on the offensive… but he did kind of tend to, you know, not give a damn about collateral damage either way.

But they needed _some_ kind of security, and Connor was right that they probably couldn’t do better than Flynn. They’d only be getting more attention from now on. Connor was negotiating several big contracts, and Jiya had caught him listening to podcasts on previous winners of the physics Nobel with a speculative gleam in his eye.

She wasn’t really looking forward to the attention, but handling that was part of Connor’s job. And they kind of had to scale up if they were ever going to make a real dent in energy production.

The three of them had big plans for massively scaling up R&D with the new revenue. Right now a bunch of their income was still from other companies licensing their various patents, like the ones Jiya and Venkatesh held now for improvements on the 3D printing process, but bigger contracts would give them more breathing room.

Their portion of the royalties on their patents also gave Jiya and Rufus a little cushion in their own income. It was nice to know that if the company went under tomorrow, she and Rufus had enough savings now to tide them over for quite a while until they found other jobs. Starting this company with Connor hadn’t been a risk compared to some of the things they’d done in the war, but that wasn’t really the standard she wanted to live the rest of her life by, you know?

One specific stream of royalties, she’d decided to devote to a foundation dedicated to researching pancreatic cancer. It wasn’t much now, but one day she hoped it would be.

Something funny in the company intranet pulled her attention back to the present. She narrowed her eyes. Someone was playing games. Another attempt by the activists? She seriously doubted they were this tech-savvy, but there were other groups.

Whoever it was, she slapped them down, temporarily patched the breach they’d been exploiting, and filed a bug report. Lupe, their new-ish sysadmin, was taking two days vacation for her daughter’s quinceañera, so someone else would have to keep things locked down until—

Oh, back for more punishment, huh? Grimly, Jiya started tracking the intrusion towards its source.

“Okay, I admit, you’re better than I am. Happy?”

She turned to look at Flynn, who’d appeared behind her. “What?”

“But I wanna make a fair test of your systems, and I’m _guessing_ you don’t play defense twenty-four seven.”

Oh. “I hadn’t realized Connor had asked you to run an intrusion test.” She stood up. “Everyone, back up your work!” she called.

Her coworkers poked their heads above their consoles, looking kind of like disgruntled prairie dogs.

“ _Now_ ,” she added, which produced a satisfactory wave of typing. She waited. “Everyone done?”

She counted nods, and then turned to Flynn. “Go ahead.”

“Hey,” Rufus said, sitting beside her after a few minutes. “If Flynn’s going to spend all afternoon wreaking havoc in our systems, maybe this would be a good time to go to lunch?”

“Hungry for anything in particular?”

“Well… it is Tuesday.”

“Tacos it is, then.”

#

After a while, the rhythm of their footfalls became meditative. Lucy let her mind empty, until all that was left was an awareness of how their steps synced, then echoed, then synced, of the counterpoint of their breathing.

They didn’t often run together, for the obvious nine inches of reasons. But sometimes it was worth it for him to go slow and her to push herself.

They turned towards home. She was wet with sweat, her legs burned, and her breath came roughly. She felt good. She felt powerful. She felt like she could take on the world with him beside her.

Within sight of the house, they slowed to a walk, because neither of them were eighteen any more, nor did they enjoy sudden cramps. She stretched for a moment in front of the house, and watched him carefully massage his thigh, where Emma had shot him.

“Too much?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

She basked in the runner’s high as they went inside, as she took off her shoes. He pulled off his own shoes and reached around her to lock the door behind them. He smelled— well, sweaty. But also, suddenly, really, really _good_. She put her hand behind his neck before he could straighten up, and kissed him.

When they pulled away, he glanced down at her, and— and knowing from that one quick look that he found her attractive, sweaty and disheveled and flushed as she was—

She doubted he’d meant for that look to go anywhere. But it was gasoline on the fire.

She kissed him again, this time with intent, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing herself against him…

“You don’t wanna clean up first?” he murmured against her mouth, after an interval that left them both breathing a little roughly again.

From the way he had her shirt up around her shoulders already, she thought it was an academic question. “And waste all these endorphins?”

She unceremoniously pulled her shirt all the way off. This time— he _definitely_ intended for that look to go somewhere.

She tugged him backwards until she backed up against the door. “Too much for your leg?” she panted.

He tugged off her shorts with efficiency and picked her up with little apparent effort. “Definitely not.”

“That was a good idea,” he told her, when they were in the shower afterwards.

She smirked at him. “I do have them occasionally.”

He laughed. He lifted her onto the low step against the wall, and kissed her again. It had taken them roughly four hours after moving in to discover how convenient that step was. He leaned down to nibble at the edge of her jaw, then let his teeth scrape just against the hollow below her ear, then kissed his way down her neck.

He lingered at the top of her breast because he was a damn _tease_ , pretending not to notice that she really wanted him to move his head down about two more inches. Then he did, and she whimpered at the heat of his mouth, the slow circle of his tongue. She clutched at his shoulders as he took his time moving down her body, kissing her, tasting her, until he was on his knees.

The water was running cold by the time they got out, but it was worth it.

After they ate lunch and he Skyped with Gabriel, they ended up on the couch. She had her legs across his lap as she graded; he had a book and a notebook resting against her calf. She had to keep reminding herself to be a little harsher, because her good mood hadn’t worn off yet.

She looked up to stretch her neck. He’d been working on that book, an old history of Nepal, for about a week now. She knew he’d finished it; now he was making notes.

He saw her watching. “It’s not my story to tell,” he said after a minute. “But someone should. I was, uh…” He licked his lip. “I was thinking of an anthology.”

She nodded. The editor had liked nearly all of his unorthodox ideas for the structure of the Yugoslav Wars book, saying they brought a freshness to the work. Garcia’s own writing style, once he’d settled into it, was similarly refreshing— spare and elegant, with a deftness of phrase that was downright uncanny at times. “I like that.”

She reached for her phone when it chimed a while later, and smiled. Wyatt had taken to texting her just about every time Grace said something intelligible as ‘Dada.’ Lucy was pretty sure he thought he was being a lot smoother and more subtle about it than he actually was.

Her phone chimed again as she was putting it down. Okay, even for Wyatt in dad mode, this was excessive—

It wasn’t. She smiled at the picture. Judith had decided to take a semester off to join a field biology crew, traipsing long distances across the High Plains in search of some threatened rodent whose name Lucy couldn’t remember. They must have reached an actual town, because the picture was Judith, three others about her age, and the crew supervisor, all crowded into one restaurant booth for the picture, all beaming while looking exhausted.

Tom and Pete were doing well, too. Pete was working as a mechanic with Kevin Cody; Tom was in a national park somewhere, Denise having leaned on an administrator to overlook his lack of formal credentials and give him a shot. Lucy got fewer texts from him than she used to, but he still updated her faithfully every time he discovered a new kind of cuisine. She was pretty sure, from his occasional pictures, that he had a girlfriend now, too, but she was waiting for him to actually tell her that. She knew he and Pete and Judith had dinner together whenever they were all in the Bay Area.

She wasn’t getting much grading done, so she reached for her laptop and checked her email. She had a new message from someone she was working with, a scientist back at Stanford who’d approached her about using genetic data to inform historical perspectives and vice versa. It was kind of slow going because neither of them spoke the other’s metaphorical language, but Lucy thought they’d turn up some cool things about settlement and dispersal in the early colonial period.

God, it was good to be able to do these kinds of things without worrying about what her tenure committee would think.

It was good to be able to spend a quiet day without anyone _shooting_ at them.

Beth had emailed her a possible source for the seminar on slave narratives they were designing together. It looked fascinating; Lucy put it aside as a treat for later in the week.

And she had a panicked email from her student— she had a PhD student, now. Mikaela reminded Lucy of herself at age twenty-three— brilliant, driven, and perpetually dissatisfied with her own work— except even more tightly wound. She was also way too prone to measure herself against Lucy’s early work. It was startling for Lucy to be on the other side of that comparison. She was trying to break Mikaela of that habit.

Texts from friends near and far, emails about research, emails about teaching. It was all so ordinary. “Garcia?” she murmured after a while.

He looked up.

“The night we met you said you knew I didn’t want to follow in my mother’s footsteps.”

He nodded once.

She hesitated. “What didn’t she want about that?”

He took his time answering. “She felt in Carol’s shadow, I think,” he said finally. “She loved history, of course, but she wanted to make her own decisions for her own reasons.”

Lucy nodded slowly. She was a little curious what her alternate timeline self would have thought of Lucy’s decision to settle down like this. But she found herself actually caring less than she would have expected.

Besides the regular reminders in the nightmares that had never gone away, they’d had one scare where the war threatened to intrude back into their lives. She’d found a Homeland Security agent at their door, who’d told her that a known Rittenhouse agent was on his way to San Diego, target unknown. They’d been put under protection for about twenty-four hours, until the man had been captured. But besides that— even Wyatt’s own missions came less and less frequently, and involved more and more routine checking that a dead end really _was_ a dead end. Increasingly it was a job for Denise’s analysts, tracing the remaining threads of this conspiracy that had ensnarled the country since its founding. Very occasionally she called Lucy in to help, if they found something in an archive or in a raid.

Nearly two hundred and fifty years of Rittenhouse evil, and now they were slowly, steadily unraveling it all in the present. For good.

“I don’t think she would’ve been able to picture finding a life like this,” Garcia said after a minute. “But, then… neither could I. Not then.”

They’d given each other that, in a way.

She smiled at him, delighting all over again in the fact that he was here, they were here together. Then she looked down and picked up the next task in her delightfully mundane life.

#

“Garcia?”

They were in the last stretch of a tortuous drive home. She’d wanted to see Ethan; Garcia had taken the chance to come along and confer with Agent Christopher. The break between quarters fell at a convenient time, and Garcia’s— their— book had found a publisher, giving them something to celebrate. Plus, she wanted to check on her mother’s house, the rental of which was paying a decent chunk of their mortgage in addition to covering its own property taxes. So, full of deeply misplaced confidence that if they could handle Rittenhouse, they could certainly handle LA traffic, they’d decided to turn the whole thing into a trip along the Pacific Coast, stopping two nights on the way up and two on the way down.

Well, the scenery _had_ been gorgeous. Lots of sunshine, historical sites dating back to the 18 th century… it was so nice to visit lovely places without anyone shooting at them. She’d worried that Garcia might find the trip too boring. But over a year of living together, and he gave no indication whatsoever of longing for a more high-octane and lethal life.

He had, in fact, been deeply amused when she’d gotten into a heated argument with one of the docents at La Purisima about the impact of the Mexican War of Independence, in front of a bunch of fourth graders. She and Garcia had finally been asked to leave, because apparently a bunch of nine-year-olds couldn’t _possibly_ have heard the word ‘bullshit’ before.

She still maintained she’d been right.

They’d left this morning at a truly ungodly hour to miss the worst of the traffic, and he, bless him, had willingly driven that whole stretch, letting her nap. Now he was dozing in the front seat as she got them home.

He turned his head towards her.

“Have you ever thought about having more children?”

The dead silence from the other side of the car made her wince.

“Not… often,” he said.

She waited for him to say something, _anything_ else, but he didn’t.

“Would you—” She cleared her throat. “Would you be willing to think about it?”

“… do you,” he finally said, “want me to?”

He sounded roughly as if she’d proposed he consider a trip to the moon.

She swallowed. “I know there’s a lot of reasons that the idea might be a total non-starter for you. And that’s fine.”

Lorena. Iris. If this were a step too far… she’d understand.

“… I’m guessing,” he said finally, “that— that you, ah, want—…”

She swallowed again, wondering when her throat had gotten so dry. “I— I’d like to think about it. I’d like you to think about it, if you’re willing.”

“… with me?”

“ _Garcia!_ ”

“Sorry, Lucy, you just, uh, took me by surprise.”

That was maybe the understatement of the century. “If you know that you don’t want to, then that’s _fine._ We can stop talking about it.” She hadn’t expected him to be so surprised. She tried not to read too much into that.

“I’m happy now,” she told him. “I want you to know that. I’m happy with you. I’m happy with our life the way it is. But— I’ve thought about it from time to time, and I always thought…”

She let the tenths of a mile stretch out. “I always thought on some level I wouldn’t be good enough,” she said finally. “That I couldn’t measure up to my mother, or that I couldn’t measure up to some arbitrary standard of good motherhood. But— now? After everything? It’s just a lot less daunting.”

“Lucy, you could measure up to your mother’s parenting if you were comatose.”

Lucy snorted. “And if you do think about it and the answer’s no? I’m okay with that. I’ve never— I’ve _never_ wanted to take anything from you.”

“That’s not… how it works,” he said after a minute, his voice gentle and sad. “I’d be pretty pathetic if I only had room to— care about— a dead child and not a live one.” He glanced sideways at her. “You don’t seriously think you’ve taken anything from me by us being together. Do you?”

“No.” She didn’t have to think about it.

“Good.”

The next several miles were very quiet. Lucy spent the entirety trying not to freak out. She’d asked him to think about it, which meant she had to give him _time_ to think, though she really wanted to talk about it with him.

Ten miles. Twenty. “You really wanna bring children into the world with a man who collaborated with Nazis?”

“I’m certainly not interested in having them with anyone _besides_ you.”

“Lucy,” he began, then trailed off into a long silence.

“You know me,” he continued finally. “You know what I’ve done—”

“And I’m here anyway.”

“But a child would grow up totally ignorant.” He sighed. “Lucy— you made an informed decision to be around me, to… uhhhh… love me. A child _wouldn’t_.”

“Garcia, I didn’t exactly decide to love you,” she said drily. “Did you decide to love _me?_ ”

“No, that felt more or less inevitable.”

She couldn’t help responding to the sudden warmth in his voice. “Well, then.”

He breathed out slowly.

“Look, as our resident expert on uncomfortable parental revelations? My mom didn’t _have_ to join Rittenhouse. But even once she had, if she’d left them? I would have— I would have forgiven her.” Lucy shook her head. “You made your terrible choices from a range of terrible options. She couldn’t even say that for herself.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Abruptly, she took the next exit. In some ways this conversation was easier without them having to look at each other, but she thought they needed the visual cues.

She pulled into a parking lot and turned off the car. “Putting aside the question of whether you think you _deserve_ children,” she said softly. “Do you _want_ them?”

He sighed. He touched his tongue to his top lip. “To make that decision? With what happened to Iris? Feels… selfish. The height of idiocy.”

She watched him for a moment. “You lost them,” she said gently, “and I didn’t. I don’t want to tell you… how to feel.”

“But?” he guessed.

“But it’s… it’s _vanishingly_ unlikely that anything like that would ever happen again. That’s _why_ we fought so hard, why we all almost gave up everything. To stop it.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to tell you what to do—”

“We can take that as a given and you can just tell me.”

She hesitated. “But… don’t let the ghost of Rittenhouse dictate your life, okay?”

“Putting aside all these considerations that, ah, can’t really be put aside,” he said after a minute, “yes, I—“ He broke off, and licked his lip. “I… yes.”

Lucy watched him.

“But what the hell would we tell her— him— when she got older?” he added. “If they ever, say, Googled my name?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But we’d be far from the first parents to deal with— coming home from war. It’s just a little more…public these days.”

He sighed. “No child should have to find out their parent is a mass murderer, Lucy.”

“You’re not a mass murderer.”

“I’ve killed a lot of people. Some of them innocent.”

“I’ve also killed an innocent man. Is this a difference of degree?”

He opened his mouth. Then closed it again.

“Tell me if I’m wrong, but you’re a lot more willing to fault yourself than you are me.”

“There _is_ a difference of degree,” he said after a minute.

“… but otherwise, I’m not wrong.”

“Damn it, Lucy,” he sighed. “Not entirely, no.”

She looked at him.

His expression softened. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’d taken a crazy suggestion from you,” he admitted.

“Our last collaboration didn’t turn out that badly, did it?”

“There is a slight difference between a book and a child, Lucy.”

“Just a slight one.”

He snorted. “I confess,” he said after another silence, “to… deep curiosity about what our children would be like. Holy terrors, I’m guessing.” His mouth was solemn, his eyes were not.

She smiled. “I wasn’t asking you, us, to decide now,” she said. “Not in a burger joint parking lot. But why don’t we… I mean, can we keep thinking about this? Talking about this?”

He nodded. “I, uh. I would like that.”

She cleared her throat. “Me, too.”

He gave her a soft little smile. She started the car.

#

How did you ask your roommate, who was the father of your child and technically still your husband, to keep his damned shirt on?

You didn’t, that was how.

God, how was Wyatt _this_ oblivious? Wandering out of the shower in a damned towel to hunt through the clean laundry? Had it seriously not occurred to him that she had _eyes?_

In some ways, in a lot of ways, it _was_ easier, living with him. She was down to a few shifts a week now, because she was letting him cover the damn rent. It _wasn’t_ his job to make up for what Rittenhouse had done for her… but the lure of spending more time with Grace was too strong to resist.

They split Grace’s expenses and the groceries and the utilities and the insurance, which he’d insisted on adding her to. Whatever she had left over, went to her college fees. She’d enrolled in her first-ever class, online, a math class she had to pass to prove she should be allowed in the higher ones. It honestly wasn’t that interesting, but it made her remember how much she’d liked math, all those years ago.

Starting college. Spending so much more time with her own kid now. All good things. And, remembering her own childhood, how she’d noticed when Mom and Dad got those pinched looks on their faces… she was glad she hadn’t waited longer to agree to Wyatt’s plan.

That just left…

She _was_ still in love with him. She’d accepted this now, and was trying to get past it. And she wasn’t _that_ shallow, but it just didn’t help to have him wandering around barely clothed.

But it was worth it to spend more time with Grace. God, she was growing up so _fast_.

Jessica looked down at her, playing contentedly on the soft foam mat in the middle of the living room as Jess folded the laundry, and smiled. Grace was reaching that age where she got into _everything_. She was curious, and Jess was pretty sure once she learned a few more words, they’d have about eight hundred and forty nine ‘why’ questions a day.

She’d started out blonde and blue-eyed, but now she had her dad’s dark hair and Jessica’s eyes instead of vice versa. She was just about the cutest thing in the world, in Jessica’s unbiased opinion.

Grace looked up. “Raspbey bey.”

Wyatt came out of his bedroom. “Raspbey bey, huh?”

“Raspbey _bey_ ,” Grace ordered.

“Someone wants a raspberry belly? That what I’m hearing?” He looked down at Jessica. “You have any idea who that might be?”

“Well, it’s definitely not me,” she said drily. “I might’ve seen someone around here just a few minutes ago, though, who might’ve wanted one. About this high—” She raised her hand off the ground.

“Raspbey bey!”

So Wyatt picked Grace up and blew loud raspberries against her tummy as she giggled hysterically. That was her latest favorite game.

Wyatt made an exaggerated face. “God, you are one stinky kid. When’s the last time you had a bath?”

“No!”

Wyatt looked down at Jessica. “Monday, right? You want me to do it tonight?”

“Sure.” She definitely wasn’t going to fight him for _that_ privilege, because—

“Noooooooo!”

At first, when this had started, Jess’d been convinced she must’ve been getting shampoo in Grace’s eyes or something. So Wyatt had watched her, and said no, definitely not. They’d tried everything they could think of to make it less scary, in case _that_ was it. Toys, music, having Grace watch Jessica take a bath _first_.

Then they’d taken her to the doctor, to make sure their kid didn’t have some rare water allergy or something, and they weren’t torturing her horribly every time they bathed her. Nope. Nothing wrong with her ears or nose that would cause pain in the bath. But whichever one of them bathed her, wherever, however, Grace _howled_.

Jessica had gotten her a special after-bath sweatshirt, and right now, hanging that sweatshirt on the back of the door where Grace could see it waiting was enough to get them through bath time. Barely. But she still howled.

Jessica folded the rest of the laundry grimly. Then she went into the kitchen and did the dishes, though it wasn’t really any quieter in there. Grace really outdid herself tonight, and by the time Jess heard the door open, her ears and her mind were both ringing.

You could say this for Grace: once she went to bed, she _went_ to bed. It wasn’t long before Wyatt appeared in the kitchen. Jessica looked at his face, opened the fridge, cracked open the beer, and handed it to him.

He took a long drink. “Thanks.” Then he looked at her. “You all right?”

She was working on— letting him trust her, which was working on trusting him, in a way. So she said, haltingly, “It’s just not easy to listen to.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he muttered.

“And I don’t know— _why_ , I mean, I was a lot older than her…”

His face changed when he realized what she was talking about.

“I know— I know she’s not in pain, she’s not scared,” Jessica went on. “But sometimes just—…”

“There were _people_ ,” she blurted after a minute. “Who saw. It wasn’t like he did it in the middle of the night, it was broad _daylight_ , and—…”

He stepped forward. “Jessica, it’s okay,” he said firmly. “It’s all right. C’mere.” He cautiously hugged her, and she was shaken up enough to exhale and lean against his shoulder for a moment.

Then she pulled away and cleared her throat. “Thanks,” she muttered. She’d needed that. She shook her head. “Right after I walked away, all I thought was, I’m free now. But the more time goes on, the more I think, oh my God, that was my _life_.”

“I know how you feel,” he said after a minute.

She looked up. “You do?”

He made a dark noise at the back of his throat. “Growing up…” He made a face. “I knew what my dad did was wrong. I thought that was all there was to it, you know?” He took a swig. “But now that _I_ have a kid?” He shook his head. “ _How_ could he…” He trailed off. “If I had him here? I’d snap his neck in a damn second.”

They looked at each other, two awkward co-parents and their childhood traumas.

“What’s she gonna be, Wyatt?” Jessica asked after a minute.

He thought. “Policewoman.”

“Veterinarian.”

“Air traffic controller.”

“Historian.”

“Librarian.”

“Soldier.”

“Underwater basketweaver.”

They played this game sometimes, and it was really stupid and immensely comforting, because it always ended like this: “Whatever the hell she wants.”

Wyatt smiled. Then he sighed. “I really thought that sparkly mermaid book would do the trick.”

“Hey, it was a good idea. Clever.”

“She’s gotta grow out of this at some point, right?”

“Sure, by the time she gets old enough to date, at least.” Jessica had a brief moment of vertigo at the thought of having a child _old enough to date_.

“Yeah, _that’s_ comforting.” He drained the rest of his beer and dropped it in the recycling bin. Then his expression turned serious. “You gonna be able to handle this part when I’m gone?”

He was being sent overseas in a week. She hadn’t asked where, but he’d told her he thought it would be weeks and not months.

And that there’d probably be more trips after this one.

“I’ll do whatever I have to for her.” It came out without a second thought.

Wyatt watched her. “If I— don’t make it back, all the paperwork’s in order. Survivor’s benefits for her, TOD on my accounts, all that.”

“I’ve got a better idea: you just come back,” Jessica said. “She deserves to grow up knowing her dad.”

Wyatt nodded.

“And, you know. I might miss you a little.”

Wyatt grinned crookedly. “Might miss me a little, huh?”

“Well, at bath time, when there’s laundry to be done…”

“Wow, I’m flattered,” he muttered.

“Leave her a letter, Wyatt,” she said after a minute.

“A letter?”

“In case you don’t come back,” she said. “She deserves more than my word on how much you loved her.”

He suddenly looked old and solemn. “Couldn’t hurt, I guess.”

“You better come back,” Jessica added. “I know people with a time machine.”

He snorted. “Don’t worry,” he promised. “There’s nothing in the world that could keep me away from her.”

#

She met Rufus and Wyatt at a new place downtown that she could immediately tell was rife with hipsters. Jiya was in San Antonio leading a panel on printable solar cells, and Garcia, as he sometimes did, had elected not to come.

“Hey,” Wyatt said, as they were waiting for their server to appear, and pretending it was totally normal to drink out of Mason jars. “Pendleton’s getting some of your solar cells next month. The, um…”

“Marlin cells,” Rufus supplied. “Must be part of our pilot project with DoD.”

“Yeah. Those.”

“Marlin cells?” It was the first time she’d heard them called that.

“Yeah, you know. Marri and Carlin equals Marlin.” He looked a little sheepish, which was adorable.

“Oh my God, I love that,” she said.

“It was just an internal shorthand, and then Connor leaked it to the press.” Rufus took a drink. “I’d never had TIME magazine call me before.”

“Oh my God, really? You’re going to be in TIME?”

He shook his head. “I told them to talk to Connor. That’s part of the deal. He handles the publicity, Jiya and I are silent partners.”

Wyatt looked at her. “Five bucks says they’re on the cover within five years.”

She shook her head. “I’m not taking that bet.”

Rufus smiled, looking bashful. It was, again, adorable.

She looked back at Wyatt. “So? What’s the latest with Grace?”

Wyatt’s face lit up. “I swear, she’s learned a new word every time Jess or I turn around. Yesterday it was meatball.”

“… meatball?” Rufus echoed. “Isn’t it usually like, cat and dog and blanky and stuff like that?”

Wyatt shrugged. “I seriously have no idea where she gets it.”

“And how is Jess?” Lucy asked. She took a sip of her water. “The, uh, platonic roommate,” she added.

Wyatt gave her a dirty look. “She’s good. Trying to figure out this whole online college thing. She had a few questions, actually, about, you know, what would look good if she wanted to, uh, do a bachelor’s later instead of an associate’s. I told her to call you.”

“She didn’t, but tell her she absolutely can.”

The server showed up and took their drink orders. When he was gone, Lucy noticed Rufus and Wyatt exchanging glances. “What?”

Rufus made a distinct _I’M not saying it_ face at Wyatt.

Wyatt grimaced, and gave in. “We’ve just been wondering if there’s something you wanna share with the class.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… you stopped drinking about five months ago—”

Lucy felt her good mood drain away at the reminder. She closed her eyes.

“… Lucy?”

She swallowed. “We’ve been trying,” she said carefully, around a suddenly painful throat. “For… about four months. It, um… just doesn’t seem to be happening.”

They both made sympathetic noises. Wyatt leaned over and touched her shoulder.

“I mean, that’s not that long, right?” she added. “ … you know what? I actually don’t really want to talk about it.” After all the thought, the effort, the courage of making a decision, making _this_ decision— it felt worse than a letdown.

Maybe worst of all, she kept having these late, heavy, painful periods. She didn’t know if that was just her new normal, after a couple of years on the implant… or if she was, in fact, getting pregnant. For about a week at a time.

She swallowed again.

“Sure,” Rufus said. “Um. Um, I’m taking Jiya to Hawaii next month.”

Wyatt looked at him. “You realize Hawaii has a lot of outside, right?”

“You know what else it has? Toilet paper,” Rufus retorted.

She let the conversation carry on without her for a few minutes while she recovered. Then she remembered what she had with her. “Oh! I do have another kind of baby to show you,” she said, during the next lull. She pulled the new-smelling book out of her bag and put it on the table, aware that she was, in fact, beaming like a proud parent. “Advance review copy.”

“Garcia Flynn, Lucy Preston,” Wyatt read off the cover. “Well, I think I can safely say none of us saw _that_ coming.” He tapped the book.

“I’m hoping it’s going to reach more people than the usual audience,” she admitted. “There aren’t enough books about wars written by people who actually fought in them.”

“You can say that again,” Wyatt muttered. “Lost count of the number of military books I’ve run across written by eggheads who don’t know anything.”

“Hey, how’s _your_ book coming?” Rufus asked. “Your other book. The labor one.”

“It’s going well. I’m planning a trip to Chicago over the next break to check some archives there. I’m, um, actually almost done with a first draft. Depending on what this new trip turns up.”

Wyatt raised his eyebrows, and his glass. “Well. To our resident author, Dr. Preston.”

They laughed a lot, and it was a lovely evening. She was really glad to see Wyatt before he headed overseas next week. Which she supposed was another milestone in the fight against Rittenhouse, that Denise was confident enough in their progress to release him for the occasional extended mission.

But still, what stuck in Lucy’s mind as she drove home was those two minutes of conversation about the fact that she and Garcia were trying to conceive a child.

It had been really daunting at first, even if she did have a lot more faith in her own competence now. But then it hadn’t happened, and hadn’t happened— or worse, it was happening and she kept losing it very early. Now she felt like she could face anything if— if she could only get the chance.

But the odds… well. She was thirty-six, and he was forty-four.

“Garcia?” she asked quietly, when they were in bed that night.

He turned to look at her.

She wanted to look away, but she didn’t. “I… we have to accept that I may never be able to conceive,” she began carefully.

“Lucy, it may not be anything to do with you. You know that, right?”

“Oh, really? Did you and Lorena have any problems having Iris?”

He winced. “No, but that was a decade ago, before I spent quality time sitting a few feet from a plutonium core.”

“I thought it was shielded.”

“It _was_ shielded, but Anthony wasn’t thinking of any of our reproductive prospects when he built the thing.”

“Either way,” she said after a minute. “Maybe this just isn’t happening for us, and I…”

She turned to look at him. “It’s never— I’ve never thought it had to be a _biological_ child. That’s not really that important to me.”

She knew the adoption process could be long, convoluted, and expensive, and she did kind of want to carry their child. So they’d tried this way first. But… family wasn’t blood. Not by any means. She knew he shared that opinion.

… he was, suddenly, looking at her with a level of sorrow she hadn’t seen since the war.

Her heart raced unpleasantly. “Garcia?”

“I was convicted of homicide, Lucy,” he said quietly. “No agency would place a child here.”

She stared at him.

How had this not occurred to her?

“That was,” she said, “no, that was during the war—” Her voice shook.

“I still did it. It’s still on my record. It’s only by the grace of God and Denise Christopher that I went free at all.”

She closed her eyes.

“I, uh. Looked into this,” he said quietly. “Some time ago.”

She took a deep breath.

“Lucy, I’m so sorry.” He sounded shattered.

She turned onto her back, then onto her other side, because if he couldn’t see her face, maybe— maybe she could—

“It’s fine,” she managed. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about that earlier.”

“Maybe because you’re not used to relationships with felons?” he said drily.

They’d been happy before this. Then she’d gone and gotten greedy. She never should have even brought it up, because now that they’d thought about it, now that they’d made the space for a child, in more ways than one—

 _Now_ it felt like something was missing.

_Why wasn’t surviving enough? Surviving, and being with him? What made me think I could ask more?_

“Lucy,” he said quietly, in the tone that she had come to know meant, _I don’t know how to reach you; are you okay?_

She rolled over again. “I’ve studied anthropology,” she said, covering her eyes with her hand. “I should know that every single reason this— makes me feel inadequate as a woman— is complete _bullshit_.” She swallowed. “But… I do still feel inadequate. Which just makes me feel worse, because then I feel like a bad woman _and_ a bad feminist.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lucy.” His voice was soft and fierce.

“Intellectually, I know that,” she whispered after a minute.

The light clicked on. He gently pulled her hand away from her face, staring down at her intently. “Listen to me,” he said. “No matter what the physiological reason is— Lucy, _there is nothing wrong with you_.”

She rested her head against his chest. Nodded. She felt her perspective returning. Even without children, they had each other. They had their friends.

She looked up, and reached up, easing her thumb along the lines of his face. He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch. Sometimes, when she did that, he looked like a cat on the verge of purring. That tended to be either incredibly attractive, incredibly moving, or both. Tonight it was moving.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “we’ll still get old and wrinkled while bickering about fin de siècle France, right?” Her voice wasn’t quite steady, and she knew she had tears in her eyes. But they were not all tears of sorrow.

He relaxed. _Of course_ he would have taken being the bar to their adopting as—

“Yes, Lucy,” he told her gravely. “We’ll always have nineteenth-century Paris.”

She groaned. “You’re terrible. I love you. Good night.”

He leaned forward, took her face in both hands, and kissed her slowly, thoroughly, and at length. It hit her viscerally, in a way she needed: _we have each other_.

He pulled back. “Good night, Lucy,” he whispered, and turned out the light.

#

Jiya dried the last of the dishes, feeling… she wasn’t sure what she felt. It had been good to see Lucy. Less good to see her upset.

Rufus came back from taking the trash to the chute, and washed his hands. Then he put his arm around her waist and kissed her forehead. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She sighed.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“At least we got her out of the house.”

“And, if we do go visit your mom this year, now we have a list of suggested historical landmarks in Beirut to see, itemized and ranked by importance.”

Jiya snorted. She made tea for both of them, and they went to sit on the balcony for a few minutes.

“Hey?” she said.

“Mmm.”

“This whole Lucy-Flynn parenthood saga…”

“Yeah, what about it?” Rufus asked when she didn’t continue.

She sighed. “It’s just— we’ve never talked about whether _we_ want kids.”

They hadn’t. First they’d just been dating, and then they hadn’t really “just” been dating any more but there’d been Rittenhouse, and then he’d been _dead_ , and then the war had ended, and then they’d been up to their asses in solar cells pretty much ever since.

He was quiet for a minute. “Do you?”

“I said _we_ , not _me_.”

“Well, you are a pretty important part of we.”

She made a cranky noise, and looked out at the lights. “I used to say I didn’t know,” she said after a minute. “But… I’m pretty sure I _do_ know. And I just… don’t think I want them.” She looked back at him. “Maybe my maternal instincts just haven’t kicked in yet or something. But right now? Yeah, I… don’t.” She hesitated. “What about you?”

“I honestly don’t have strong feelings either way,” he said slowly. “I haven’t… spent a lot of time thinking about it. If you were to want kids, I’d be happy with that. But I don’t think my heart’s gonna break or anything if you feel this way forever.”

She studied his face carefully. “You sure?”

He shrugged. “Pretty sure, yeah.”

“Okay.” She felt relieved. Really, really relieved, to be honest. “Probably worth having this conversation every few years. I guess?”

“Although,” he said after a minute.

“Rufus?”

Silence.

“I’d rather know than wonder.”

“Okay. Although, I have thought occasionally about being a foster parent.”

Jiya considered this.

“I just, um,” he said quietly. “There’s a lot of kids in the system. A lot of them look like me. I could’ve been one of them.”

She’d never heard this before. She looked back to him, surprised.

He shrugged, maybe, understandably, not wanting to say much about it. “It was after my dad walked out. My mom was doing the best she could, but… someone at school, I never figured out who, decided that wasn’t good enough. Reported her for neglect.”

“Rufus,” Jiya breathed.

He sighed. “I mean, the system isn’t exactly weighted towards Black single moms. Then _or_ now. Mom was terrified of having me taken, I was terrified of going. The social worker who showed up, she said pretty much immediately that the case was clearly unfounded and she was closing it. But those two weeks in between… I’ll always remember them.”

After a minute, he shook his head slowly. “And I’ve never forgotten how Mom pushed herself even harder after that. She was so afraid of being reported again.”

He stared at the bottom of his mug. “We need the system, don’t get me wrong. It’s just… whose interests does it have at heart, you know?”

Finally, he looked up. “So, uh, yeah. That’s why I’ve thought about it on and off over the years.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I never told you.” He took a deep breath. “I know that sounded, uh, really tragic, but I’m not saying my heart’s set on it or anything. I’ve just… you know.”

“I… honestly think I might be a crap foster parent,” she admitted after a minute. “But I’m willing to, you know. Talk about it? With you.”

Older kids, maybe? Definitely not infants or toddlers. Maybe… she could see considering that.

“Pretty sure you wouldn’t be a crap any kind of parent.”

“I’ve killed houseplants.”

“At least one of those was Stasia’s girlfriend watering it with grape soda.”

He had a point there.

“But,” she said. “Um, maybe after—”

“After we stop working such crazy hours? Definitely.”

They sat there a few more minutes before Jiya yawned. “Speaking of,” she slurred, mouth wide open.

“Yeah, I’m exhausted too.”

But she stopped him just inside the door. “Hey. You know what I love about being married to you?”

“… it’s just the one thing? That’s a little ominous.”

She rolled her eyes. “I keep finding out… I keep finding out more about you. That I love. I mean— I don’t love that you went through that— I just— yeah.” She took his head in both hands and kissed him, hoping her tongue would be somewhat less clumsy that way.

Finally they pulled apart. “It’s really not the end of the world if you don’t want to, you know,” he said. “I’m not even sure _I_ want to.”

“I mean, we have been on stranger adventures together,” she pointed out.

He smiled down at her, that slow one that she hadn’t ever told him reminded her of Han Solo because he’d be totally insufferable if she ever did. “We have.”

#

Lucy looked around Rufus and Jiya’s apartment, now quite familiar to her, and thought about how they’d come up in the world.

“So,” she said, “which was worse? The bunker, or the Sauna?”

Jiya groaned. “Let’s not.”

“Fair enough.” She tucked her feet up beside her and leaned against Garcia’s shoulder. He tightened his arm around her own shoulders.

Kneeling in front of the TV stand, Jiya popped open the DVD case— “Rufus?” She held the disc by the edge, but Lucy got the distinct impression that she wasn’t being _careful_ , she found whatever it was… loathsome?

“What?” Rufus looked over her shoulder. “Hey, definitely wasn’t me.”

Jiya went still. Then she turned. “Hiding behind a pregnant woman won’t save you, Flynn,” she warned. “This is a whale documentary. Where is our _movie?_ ”

“It’s in the other case,” Garcia told her. Lucy could hear the smirk in his voice.

Rufus just shook his head.

Lucy was seven weeks along. Most people didn’t share the news until after twelve weeks, and after that terrifying night of spotting, spent with her face pressed against Garcia’s chest, praying, she understood why.

But the team was her family. She wanted them to know now. Even if it meant she and Garcia later had to tell them… well.

Besides, she hadn’t had much of a choice. She’d almost accepted that they were never going to conceive when she’d been stricken with such violent nausea that she’d spent the first week assuming the stomach flu explained both the vomiting and her late period. And that frankly had never really gotten _better_ ; what relief she’d found had been from changing what she was eating. So there was no way she could’ve kept the nausea a secret for any length of time. Or the fact that she was basically living on Gatorade and dried Cheerios, the only things she could reliably keep down. Or her tendency to fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

Merciless nausea, exhaustion, tender and painful breasts, mood swings. This whole experience was a delight. Every time she felt guilty about wondering _why_ they’d thought this was such a good idea in the first place, she remembered that Mom had tried to coerce her into Rittenhouse, and thought maybe she wasn’t quite preemptively winning the very worst parent award yet.

Jiya straightened up and pointedly dropped a DVD case reading _The Majesty of the Sea_ in Garcia’s lap. “Okay, we’re just waiting on Wyatt.”

“He should be here by now.” Lucy reached for her phone to text him. He should’ve been back midday yesterday. “Do you think he’s stuck in Germany or… something?”

Rufus shook his head. “He definitely landed in San Diego. I got a message from him.”

A little knot of worry eased in Lucy’s chest.

“And I suggested we move tonight so he could, you know, recover and see Grace, and he said no,” Rufus added. “He’ll be here.”

“Lucy, what was the verdict on snacks?” Jiya asked.

“The smell of popcorn should be fine.” But Lucy really appreciated her checking. She appreciated how the whole team had been great about— well, everything, really. Like when, at the beginning, Lucy had requested their get-togethers just _not involve food_ for at least the next eight weeks, no one had objected at all.

“Okay.”

“Just don’t season it with, you know, raw garlic or—” She broke off and swallowed, pressing her hand to her mouth. Why had she thought saying _that_ was a good idea?

She took deep, careful breaths.

“Plain,” Jiya promised her, and hurried, maybe retreated, towards the kitchen.

Lucy closed her eyes, and inched even closer to Garcia. They’d never been much for affectionate displays in front of the team before, but she’d felt so rotten these past seven weeks that she would take her comfort where she could get it, thank you very much.

And he had been comforting. Especially those early weeks when she’d even felt too sick to sleep, and they’d talked for hours. About how strongly the feeling of being out of control of her own body had struck her. About if he was doing okay with this now that it was actually happening. About how much the pain to come scared her— because _you’ll just be so eager to be done being pregnant that you won’t care_ was _not encouraging_ if you thought through the logic of it. About their plans for the future. About whether she was ever _really_ going to stop throwing up, or it was all a cruel trick.

He nearly always seemed to know what to say or do, and that reminded her, forcefully, that he’d done this before.

A familiar knock at the door interrupted her thoughts. Rufus went to open it. “Hey, man— oooooh.”

So Lucy was not entirely surprised by Wyatt’s limp, or his bruises, and she’d been expecting his palpable air of exhaustion. He mustered a smile when she got up to hug him. “How are you, Lucy?”

“How am I? How are _you?_ ”

“Guys, I’m fine.” Wyatt sounded disgruntled. “It’s hardly anything.”

“Just a flesh wound,” Rufus muttered. “Or, you know, several.”

Jiya came out with the popcorn and greeted Wyatt. They all settled onto various pieces of furniture. “What’re we watching?” Wyatt asked.

“A B movie I found at the thrift store,” Jiya said. “The fighting will horrify you and Flynn, the science will horrify me and Rufus, and the history will horrify Lucy.”

“Great,” Wyatt muttered.

As the credits rolled, she leaned against Garcia again and cracked open the plastic container of Cheerios she carried with her everywhere. At this rate, she was half-convinced she was going to give birth to an artificial-orange oat.

She closed her eyes about five minutes in and dozed through an hour of screams, terrible dialogue, explosions, various wet-sounding noises, and more. She blinked groggily when the end credits appeared. “How was it?”

“Great,” Jiya said.

“You would’ve loved the three-round cage match between zombie George Washington and vampire Thomas Jefferson,” Rufus said.

“Oh, yeah,” Wyatt agreed.

She looked from one of them to the other. She glanced up at Garcia, but his trying-badly-not-to-smile face wasn’t much of a giveaway. “That wasn’t really in there. Was it?”

“‘I cannot tell a lie,’” Rufus said, straight-faced. “‘Braaaains.’”

She decided she was better off not knowing. Instead, she told them, “I found a publisher for my book.” It was the same publisher who’d put out two of her other books, but it was still a relief. “The goal is to get the proofs out the door before the baby shows up.”

“Hey, that’s great,” Rufus said.

Wyatt cleared his throat. “Speaking of. Hey, uh, Flynn, I heard some guys talking about your book. The Bosnia one.”

Garcia looked up quickly. “On base?”

Wyatt nodded.

Lucy knew Garcia probably wouldn’t let any of them see what that meant to him, but she could tell, anyway. He hadn’t started that book because he wanted to convince a bunch of academics he was right— okay, not entirely. She knew he’d been hoping it would reach more people than that.

“And, uh, thanks for having the girls over for dinner while I was gone,” Wyatt told her, glancing at Garcia as well. “Jess told me.”

Lucy nodded. It had been a little awkward, that first time, considering… everything. But it was hard to care about that when it was taking the combined efforts of three adults to keep a determined toddler who seemed to have about seventeen hands from smearing food everywhere.

Something for her and Garcia to, God willing, look forward to. Oh boy.

“Of course,” she told him. “We enjoyed it.”

Then she glanced up and caught sight of Jiya’s expression as she grabbed the empty popcorn bowl, and frowned a little. “Oh, Garcia, uh, tell Wyatt about Grace and the dish towel,” she said, and excused herself to follow Jiya.

Jiya dumped the kernels in the trash and started to wash the bowl out. “Hey,” Lucy said quietly, leaning against the doorway. “Everything okay?”

“Fine.” Jiya gave her a bright smile.

Oh, God. Was it this unconvincing when _she_ did it?

“… you sure?”

Jiya’s expression turned serious. “I’m really happy for you,” she said.

Lucy frowned, and waited. “… but?”

“There doesn’t have to be a but.”

“No, but there _can_ be.” Did Jiya and Rufus…?

Jiya sighed. “My mom wants grandkids,” she said. “Like, she _really_ wants grandkids. And she thinks that’s something I owe her.”

“Ugh. I’m sorry, Jiya.”

Jiya shook her head. “I mean, you’re the last person I should be complaining to about unrealistic parental expectations.”

Lucy snorted. “The fact that my parents helped run a megalomaniacal cult doesn’t make it any better for your mom to put this on you.”

“Watching you and Flynn?” Jiya said after a minute. “And Wyatt? It’s pretty clear that this is something you guys _want_. And I’m happy for you. And… the more time goes on, the more I’m convinced it’s not something _I_ want.”

“Jiya, _that’s okay_.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to my mom. Right now it feels like she just cares about the state of my uterus, not the work I’m doing, or that Rufus and I are happy the way we are, or…” She shook her head.

“Jiya, I’m sorry,” Lucy said again, and stepped forward and gave her a hug. “The work you’re doing is amazing, for the record. Not that you need me to tell you that.”

Jiya smiled at her when they stepped back again. “I mean, Rufus and I are kind of low-key saving the world. Or at least we’re helping.”

“Again,” Lucy pointed out. “Have you talked to Denise?”

Jiya frowned. “About my mom?”

Lucy nodded.

“She said it was having kids that _fixed_ her relationship with her mom.”

“But she might also be able to give you some advice about dealing with unrealistic parental expectations. And having a relationship around that. If you… want that.”

Jiya sighed. “She is still my mom,” she said after a minute.

And this whole war had brought home to all of them how important it was to have family around you, whether family by birth, by marriage, or by choice.

“Let me know if you ever need to talk, or just vent, okay?” Lucy said, and swallowed a yawn. “Sorry. It’s not you. I think it’s just time for my post-nap pre-bed nap. No one warned me that pregnancy would turn me into a hibernating bear.”

Jiya snorted.

“Thanks for hosting. I enjoyed it. You know, sleeping through the movie.”

“No problem.”

Lucy hesitated. “Jiya?”

Jiya looked up.

“I know you don’t need me to tell you this, but… stick to your guns, okay? Because honestly? This is kind of miserable, and it’s worth it— or it will be— because you’re right, this _is_ something Garcia and I want. But if you don’t?” Lucy shook her head.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty crappy default setting,” Jiya said.

“Exactly.”

“Hey,” Jiya added. “I am really happy for you.”

Lucy smiled, and immediately teared up. Pregnancy hormones. Awesome. “That means a lot to me. Thank you.”

“Rufus and I are already planning how to corrupt your kid.”

“You are so not teaching my child Klingon.”

#

It was a busy night, but she was good at her job. She kept everyone served, cleaned the bar and restocked her garnishes, and double-checked the week’s orders. She thought about going home to Grace, and taking her to buy new shoes tomorrow— how did she outgrow them so _fast?_ — and finishing her homework.

The door opened and a big man lumbered through. Jess eyed him, then decided he probably wasn’t going to be trouble. He looked like he just wanted to sit down for a while and lose himself.

She changed her mind when he pulled a big knife out of his coat.

“FELICIA!” he shouted, heading towards the knot of ladies in the back corner booth.

A man tried to grab him and got the knife across his torso. Jess grabbed the half-empty bottle of a customer who’d just hit the ground and threw it end-over-end. The bottle slammed into his wrist— he howled— she grabbed the biggest knife _she_ could find, and vaulted over the bar.

She thought she’d got lucky when the man nearly dropped the knife, but instead he just switched it to his other hand. Damn it. But at least now he was paying attention to her instead of the women, who were taking the chance to flee.

“Stay out of this, bitch!” he warned her. “All I want is my girlfriend!”

Jess grabbed the nearest chair, swung it around, and rammed the legs into his legs and stomach. He grunted and staggered back. Then he grabbed the bottom rung and forced it back towards her. He was a lot bigger and stronger than her, and she couldn’t stop him. She let go and dodged out of the way. She tried to slam a table into his legs as his momentum carried him forward, hoping to take him down—

He decided he’d had enough of her, and cleared the table faster than she’d expected. She barely got out of the way in time. She heard the blade whistle through the air by her head.

Well, this was a damn stupid place to be.

She got in a solid kick to his knee and then danced out of his range again. _There_ —

Someone had abandoned a folding tray stand on the other side of that table—

Something moved in her peripheral vision. She leapt backwards as he lunged, saving herself from being gutted. The knife still bit into her side.

Rittenhouse had taught her to focus. The pain was there, but it wasn’t important. It wasn’t; her body was just lying. She forced herself to follow through on her grab for the folding stand. He scoffed at her. Yeah, without a top, it made a pretty damn poor shield, didn’t it?

She flipped it around and slammed the legs together as he lunged, trapping his knife arm in the— oh God, this hurt— top. He yelled in anger and charged forward, trying to gut her. She ducked clumsily out of the way, dragging him by the wrist in a new direction—

Her side _hurt_ —

She forced herself into one last burst of speed and jumped over the nearest table, dragging his arm behind him before he could recover. He was at the wrong angle now to stab— she caught his wrist, applied pressure, and snapped it with a _crack_. He screamed. She wrenched the knife out of his hand and staggered back, nearly falling over a table before she reached a safe distance. She looked around to make sure Felicia, whoever she was, was out of range, too.

The world went kind of quiet. She grabbed a stack of napkins and pressed them to her side, sagging backwards against a booth.

Some of her regulars tied the guy’s ankles with an extension cord, then tied him to one of the booths. She told someone else where to find the first aid kit, behind the bar. By the time the cops and paramedics arrived, Jessica knew it wasn’t bad, but it still _hurt_.

“Don’t need an ambulance,” she told them. “Someone can just drive me.”

But they bundled her onto the gurney anyway, and she gave up and let them wheel her into the ambulance. She felt kind of lightheaded.

The ER was a blur of lights and pain. A resident cleaned the wound— a decent-sized gash— and then stitched it up. “You got lucky,” she told Jessica. “An inch lower and it would’ve missed your ribs and gotten your guts.”

She called the manager and let him know what had happened. Then an officer arrived to take her statement. God, she hoped this night didn’t end with her in jail. What would they find if they ran her name?

“What about Felicia?” she asked.

“The woman he was after?”

Jessica nodded.

“She’s shook up, but unhurt. According to her, he violated a restraining order coming after her.” The cop hesitated. “Did you know he had a bulletproof vest?”

Jessica shook her head.

“He came there intending to do a lot of damage.”

 _Yeah, I’d figured that out_.

“Jess!” Wyatt burst through the door. When he found her sitting up and talking, he slowed, shoulders slumping in relief. “It was on the news, you weren’t picking up, went by the bar and no one could tell me anything except you got _stabbed_ going after a guy with a _knife_.”

“Yep,” she said tiredly. Then: “Wyatt, where’s Grace?”

“Lucy and Flynn.”

The officer let them be. “Jess,” Wyatt said again, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. He frowned down at the bandages.

“Missed everything important. I’ll be fine.”

“You want me to go home for some clothes for you?”

She shook her head. “I think they’re discharging me.” She looked up at him. “Can you just take me home?”

It took them another hour to get out of there. By then Wyatt had heard the whole story. “That was _stupid_ , Jessica,” he said, helping her into the car. “You were unarmed and he had weight and reach on you.”

“You’d’ve done the same thing.” She let him fasten her seatbelt around her.

“You have a kid at home, Jess. She’s not growing up without a mom either.”

“You’d’ve done the same _thing_ , Wyatt. Or do you wanna try to tell me otherwise?”

He gave her a pointed look as he started the car.

“You could’ve been hurt a lot worse,” he said after about a mile.

She was in pain, and she didn’t have the energy for his worrying all the way to Lucy and Flynn’s house and all the way home. “Didn’t know you cared, Wyatt,” she managed weakly.

“Yeah, you _did_ ,” he snapped.

She looked at him, surprised.

“Yeah,” she admitted after a minute. “I did.”

Those words seemed to hang pleasantly in the air.

When they reached Flynn and Lucy’s house, Flynn carried Grace out sleeping. Jessica saw the deep lines in his face, and how carefully he handed her to Wyatt, and wondered… she wondered a lot of things.

Lucy came to the passenger side window as Wyatt buckled Grace into her car seat. “Oh my God. Are you okay?”

“I will be.” Jessica tried to muster up a smile. “Thanks.”

“Do you— need anything?”

“No. As you can imagine, Wyatt keeps a terrifyingly well-stocked first aid kit at home, and they filled my prescription for the pain before we left. How was she?”

“Fine,” Flynn said, coming to stand next to Lucy. “Put her to bed in the spare bedroom, she went right back to sleep.” He glanced over the car. “Whatever Wyatt told her, he managed not to scare her.” He looked down at Jessica again. “You look like you’ve had worse.”

Jessica snorted, and then regretted it. “Thanks for your concern,” she managed. Then: “And… thanks for looking after her.”

Flynn looked at her blankly. “Yes.” He headed inside.

“Let us know if you need anything, okay?” Lucy said.

“No more riot act, okay?” Jessica said as they pulled out of the driveway.

“Well, you scared me.”

She knew that was the closest she’d get to an apology. “I told you, you would’ve done the exact same thing.”

“I know,” he admitted.

He was really great about it all, actually. He carried Grace up to bed first, then took most of Jessica’s weight going up the stairs, because the building didn’t have an elevator. He even got her pajamas out for her. Then she struggled for about five minutes, silently swearing, to get into them, because there was no way in hell she was asking him to unhook her bra no matter _how_ bad it hurt to do it herself.

He knocked softly on the door.

“Yeah,” she said.

He came in and handed her a glass of water and her pain pills. He sat gingerly beside her on her bed. “You need anything else?”

She shook her head.

He put his arm around her shoulders. Jessica exhaled, and relaxed against him a minute before she pulled away.

“Holler if you need something?” he asked, as he stood.

She nodded.

“That was, uh… that was brave, Jess,” he told her, as he turned out the light.

“The stuff I know how to do?” she said. “I couldn’t just watch.”

He stayed in the doorway a minute. “I wouldn’t’ve been able to either,” he said. “But you don’t have to put yourself in front of every dick that comes along just ‘cause you made some fucked-up choices before.”

She looked at him, again startled.

“Not how it works, Jess,” he added. His smile came out small, and crooked, and wry. “Trust me… I know.”

She slept late the next morning and finally went carefully out to the kitchen. “Good morning, baby.” She bent down and kissed Grace’s hair, wincing at the strain in her side.

Wyatt handed her a plate of breakfast. Jess sat down without protesting.

“You made the news,” he told her, turning the laptop so she could see it.

“‘Hero bartender disarms attacker?’” she read in disbelief.

“What hero?” Grace asked.

“A hero is someone who’s really brave and does scary stuff,” Wyatt told her.

Grace considered this. “Mommy hero?”

“She sure is.”

Jessica scoffed. What had Wyatt told Grace, anyway?

Grace looked up at her. “Mommy hurt?”

“Just a little scratch, sweetie.” Jessica ruffled her hair. “I’ll be better in no time.”

“Daddy look after Mommy.”

“Yep, that’s the plan,” Wyatt said.

“Daddy kiss it better?”

“Mmm, no, not what the doctor prescribed this time,” Jessica said.

“Listen, why don’t you go play with your squishy blocks and let Mommy rest?” Wyatt suggested

Grace jumped down and ran over to the living room mat. Wyatt glanced at his phone. “Rufus says you’re a meme now,” he reported.

“Oh, God. That’s the last thing I need, the news getting out of—”

Her phone rang.

“San Diego,” she muttered. She picked up. “Hi, Mom. I’m fine, how are you?”

She was on speaker. It was Mom _and_ Dad, a twofer. They didn’t let her get a word in edgewise for a solid minute. Jessica took advantage to gobble a few bites, because she had a feeling this would be a long call.

It was.

When she finally persuaded her parents they could let her go, her breakfast was stone cold. She’d just decided it wasn’t worth the pain of getting up and microwaving it when her phone rang _again_.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she said, when she’d answered, “and if _you’re_ about to lecture me, remember the time when you tried to protect me from a sniper when I was wearing a _bulletproof vest_.”

Geez, somehow that didn’t get her out of _that_ conversation either. She was _glad_ her family cared, she really was. She was also in pain and just wanted to eat her damn breakfast.

She finally got the chance to read the rest of the article. _A local bartender averted near-tragedy when one of her customers turned violent_ , it began. “The real—” she glanced sideways at Grace. “ _Effing_ tragedy,” she told Wyatt, when he came out of the bathroom, “is that we’re just taking it for _effing_ granted that men are going to go after women with knives and guns when they feel like they _effing_ own them. No way this’d be getting the same amount of coverage if he’d actually managed to hurt her. We just don’t count that as _news_.”

Grace looked up. “What effing?”

“Nice one, Jess,” Wyatt muttered. Then he raised his voice. “Uh, honey, it’s a word grown-ups use when they’re being boring. You don’t wanna be boring, do you?”

“Not boring!”

Wyatt poured himself some more coffee, offered her a fresh cup, which she declined, and sat down to watch Grace play, smiling as she industriously built a block tower on the foam mat in the living room.

“I know you think I’m naive for thinking they could save the world.” Maybe it was silly, but she’d stopped saying the name when Grace was around, ‘cause she didn’t want her kid growing up ever hearing that word. “But sh— but stuff like _this_ happens, do you see why I wanted to believe it so bad?”

He made a non-committal noise. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You have all these don’t-take-any-sh— uh, _stuff,_ women,” he said. “What’re they doing working for a group that thinks things went wrong when women got power? I mean, for God’s sake, they literally tried to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment.”

“Emma wasn’t a big fan of that,” Jessica said after a minute. Which might’ve contributed to her unceremoniously killing Nicholas in 1888. “And Carol… I think she thought she’d be, you know, she’d be safe and have power no matter what. She used to tell me— you know, just talking about politics or whatever, or how they’d made different things happen— that it’s not hard to get people to work against their own interests if you appeal to some part of their identity. Guess I never saw the irony.”

She shook her head. “I know it sounds crazy. It’s just… when you’re inside, a lot of things make sense that _are_ crazy. I’m not trying to say I didn’t know it was wrong, I _did_ …”

“But they raised you.”

She stared down into her coffee cup. “But they raised me,” she agreed quietly.

Then she looked over at Grace, who was quietly telling herself a story where the squishy blocks were “horses” and the coffee table was the “stable.” The pain in Jessica’s heart eased a little.

After a few minutes, she said, “My mom mentioned visiting. Not sure if that was just a reaction to the news or what, but… you okay with that?”

Wyatt nodded.

“And you’re not allowed to ask her how she sold me to… you know.”

“I did that one time, Jessica.”

She looked at him levelly over the rim of her coffee cup. “You did that at least three times in my hearing alone.”

He didn’t look particularly abashed.

She’d been… surprised, and touched, by how deeply _angry_ Wyatt had been about what’d happened to her as a kid. But Wyatt didn’t give up on people easily. She’d known that by how he’d gotten her family to safety. How he’d _named_ their _child_.

“She can have my bed, I’ll take the couch,” Jessica added.

At some point Grace was gonna learn somewhere that it wasn’t real usual for your parents to sleep in separate rooms all the time. She’d asked not too long ago why they never kissed, and Wyatt had obligingly given Jess a peck on the forehead, which had satisfied her. But she was a growing kid, she was bound to ask awkward questions. And Jessica and Wyatt had both known this arrangement wouldn’t be forever, either.

On the other hand, Wyatt had started to leave for longer missions, which was pushing back the date when Jessica thought she might pick up more hours at work again. She hadn’t expected not working full time to last forever, but whatever Grace needed… that’s what she’d do.

As Grace made quiet whinnying noises, Jessica started to reach for both their plates. Wyatt gave her a Look and took them to the kitchen, then came back with the coffee pot. At some point parenthood didn’t take so much caffeine, right?

“So I had a bunch of librarians in the bar last week,” she said after a minute.

“Yeah? They tell everyone they were being too loud?”

She rolled her eyes. “They were talking about their programs, or whatever, and apparently they were trying to run a women’s self-defense thing but their instructor backed out last minute.” She took another drink of coffee. “I’d been kinda thinking of calling them.”

She might actually do a better job than whoever they’d had lined up, because she was a petite woman herself. But— “Not exactly sure where I’d tell them I got my training, though, you know?”

Wyatt snorted.

“But… I mean, stuff like that’s really just a _bandaid_. It might help whoever I teach, but it’s not gonna stop situations like last night.”

“Jess, I guarantee that whoever Felicia is, this morning she’s not thinking about changing all of society, she’s thinking about how damn glad she is you were there last night.”

Jessica wasn’t so sure. But he did have a point.

“You have time to think about it, anyway,” he added.

“I do now,” she grumbled into her coffee cup. Then she sighed. “Maybe there’s something for teaching women _to_ fight back, anyway. Just— not to freeze, you know? I swear, ‘nice girls don’t hit’ have got to be some of the four worst words in the world.”

She snorted. “You know, I asked Mom once why she didn’t want a girl,” she added, “and she said it was because girls had it harder and she wanted better for her kids.” Jess wanted better for her kid _too_ , but for God’s sake, that didn’t mean wishing she’d never been _born_.

Jessica knew Mom had been tired, so often, the kind of tired that sleep couldn’t touch. She _didn’t_ know exactly what’d made Mom unable to even imagine a different world for her daughter.

Things were better now. She knew Mom would never tell Grace _girls have it harder in this world_. She glanced up—

The desolate look on Wyatt’s face got her attention. Jessica rewound the conversation—

“I’m sorry, Wyatt,” she said gently. “I can’t imagine what it was like to lose her.”

To know that another Jessica had died violently, alone and terrified—

He nodded once, and turned to lean against the wall a minute.

Jessica got up, gingerly. “Hey,” she said softly, thinking it wasn’t a good idea to startle him. She put her hand on his shoulder, not sure of what else to say. “Hey.”

He looked up, eyes wet, and cleared his throat. “I think you should do it,” he said, voice a little thick. “The library thing, I mean.”

Because even if she just helped whoever she taught… that wasn’t nothing.

She nodded. “Okay.”

She went back to bed. Wyatt woke her mid-afternoon and apologized, saying he had to go to base for something. So Jess got up and sat blearily on the couch as Grace, up from her own nap, played again. Jessica fed her a snack, and then Grace snuggled against Jessica’s uninjured side as Jessica read her _The Ballad Of The Princess And Her Dragon_ for approximately the eight thousand, three hundred and sixtieth time. This month.

Jessica’s side ached, but by moving carefully, she managed to put together dinner. Wyatt got home just as she was trying to figure out whether to wait any longer for him. After dinner she discovered that even with the mirror, she couldn’t get the bandage off without tugging at her stitches. That meant letting him kneel beside her and do it for her, all frowning concern and gentle fingers. It was just a really, _really_ good thing that gash wasn’t any higher on her side.

“Thanks.” She tugged her shirt down and bolted out of her chair, grabbing the empty wrapper of the new bandage, as soon as he was done.

He followed her into the kitchen, damn him. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Fine, Wyatt.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“Nope.” She tried to brush past him out of the kitchen, but he stood his ground.

“C’mon, something’s wrong,” he said.

She cleared her throat. “We should check on Grace.”

“She’s playing with her blocks again. You can see her from here. Jess, what’s wrong?”

She looked at him. “Are you seriously this oblivious?”

It took him a minute.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, drily, in response to the look on his face. She slipped past him. “I’m not ashamed of how I feel, Wyatt.” That took some courage to get out, but it was true. She’d made it true. “But it’s not your problem.”

“Jess, wait.” He took hold of her upper arm. His hand was warm. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She turned to look at him. “Why _would_ I say anything?”

“‘Cause, maybe—”

“Maybe what? I _betrayed_ you, Wyatt.”

“Yeah, you did,” he acknowledged. “Then you saved my life. Saved Grace’s life, and your family. Saved Jiya’s life. Saved Angela and Kevin, and a whole bunch of Homeland Security agents. And probably Felicia’s life, whoever she is.”

She was very conscious of how close they were standing. And how good he smelled. And how damned attractive that perpetual scruff was. “Wyatt, if you’re telling me you might feel like— like—”

He took a half step closer. “Like what?”

She was pissed off with herself for not managing not to glance at his lips. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she whispered.

“Mmm, yeah.”

She shifted her weight towards him. “It’s probably a really _bad_ idea…”

“Just the worst,” he agreed, tilting his head.

She leaned in—

“Daddy?”

They _jumped_. Their heads clunked painfully together, and her side burned. “Fuck,” she muttered, as they scrambled apart.

“What fuck?”

Wyatt cleared his throat. “That’s just another boring grownup word, honey,” he said. “It’s about, uh, taxes.”

Jessica turned. “You need something, sweetheart?”

Grace wanted another snack, which turned into bedtime. She wanted to sleep in Jessica’s room tonight. So Jessica read her half a story until she fell asleep, and sat for a while, watching her daughter sleep peacefully. She almost conked out herself, right then, but she’d left her pain pills in the kitchen.

Wyatt was sitting at the table. “She sleeping?”

“Yeah.” Jess got herself some water and took the meds.

Wyatt cleared his throat. “Convenient.”

She sat down at the table with him. Honesty, right? “Wyatt, I don’t think I’m ready to be anyone’s girlfriend. Or wife,” she told him. “Not when I don’t know who I am myself.”

He looked disappointed. She felt kind of topsy-turvy about that.

“I get it,” he said after a minute. “I mean, you said they made their life all about me.”

She nodded. “Mom I can manage, ‘cause… she needs me.” And because Rittenhouse had never, you know, directed that part of her life.

“And Grace? She’s the most important thing in my life. Wyatt, you’ve gotta know I’m interested. But— if us getting back together would f— would mess up what she needs, I… I can’t do that.”

“I don’t think it would,” he said. “For whatever that’s worth, or I wouldn’t… you know. But I… I get it.” He looked up. “You let me know if you, uh, change your mind.”

“I’m not asking you to wait around for me.”

“Didn’t say I would. Just asked you to, you know, keep me up to date.” He gave her a crooked smile.

“Fine. I’ll subscribe you to the is-Jess-ready-to-date-Wyatt-again status feed.”

He laughed, and he looked fucking adorable and almost irresistible. “I look forward to the notifications.”

#

He woke to an empty bed, glanced at the clock, and found Lucy sitting on the counter, eating toast with ketchup.

He got himself some water and leaned against the counter next to her. The old wound in his thigh throbbed, and he eased his knuckles over it.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said after a minute. “You didn’t have to get up with me.”

“I know.” True and irrelevant.

She swallowed another bite. “You’re still okay with not knowing the sex?”

He nodded.

She looked at him, and he knew something was coming. “Would it be easier for you if it were a boy?” she asked bluntly.

He breathed out slowly. She worried this was hard for him.

It was. But not entirely in the way she thought.

“I wouldn’t have wanted this if I couldn’t treat our child as its own person,” he told her.

In fact, it might be harder if it were a boy. He’d honestly been relieved to learn Iris was going to be Iris. A boy…

He’d spent a lot of time putting distance between himself and Asher Flynn. Having a son might force him to face things he preferred to let sleep quietly in the past.

Yet he was prepared for this, too. Or he wouldn’t have been willing to try, either time.

“It’s not… difficult thinking that we’re going to have a child,” he found himself saying. “Yeah, of course it reminds me, but— Lucy, those are good memories. We were _happy_. If all I do is remember their deaths, think of them as cannon fodder for my guilt… that’s an unforgivable thing to do to Lorena. To Iris.”

He swallowed. “It’s that…” He hesitated. “I’m _terrified_ of history repeating itself.” His voice was rough.

After they’d moved to San Diego, his dreams of that night had diminished to a once-unthinkable few times a month. Now they were back, but the bodies were Lucy’s and their child. His brain was a bastard in more ways than one, because the people he loved were not _interchangeable_.

She slid off the counter. “It’s not going to happen like that,” she told him, with that quiet implacable determination that had seen her through the war.

He looked down at her, standing barefoot in their kitchen at three thirty in the morning, wearing sweatpants and a shirt with an antique bicycle on it under her robe. He had seen her broken, and yet he would not back anyone or anything in the world to take her down for good.

When he’d believed in nothing else, he’d believed in her. And it had saved him.

He swallowed.

“Tell me that occasionally,” he begged.

Her expression softened. She reached for him. They held each other very close. He gently stroked her disheveled hair, and she made a satisfied noise and leaned against his chest.

“I’m scared,” she admitted after a while.

“I know. Me, too.”

She reached up and eased her fingertips over the lines near his eyes and mouth. “We survived a time war, we can manage to raise a child, right?”

He turned his head and kissed the pad of her thumb. “Yes.”

She cupped his face. “I love you.”

He leaned down to kiss her hair, and then her mouth. She tasted, unsurprisingly, of ketchup, and he did not particularly care.

After a minute, she said, “You promised to tell me if— _when_ this becomes hard for you, if… I don’t notice.”

“Yes.” He intended to keep that promise, though she was so perceptive, so empathetic, it was hard to imagine her not noticing.

She nodded. “Okay.”

He ruined the moment by wincing, and decided to slide to the floor. It didn’t surprise him at all that out of all the wounds he’d gotten in his life, one from Emma troubled him the most.

“Garcia?”

“I’m fine.” He offered her a hand. She moved carefully to the ground, and sat between his legs. He reached up and handed her her plate. She leaned back against his chest as she finished her snack. He rested his chin against her head, and his hand, very lightly, against the new, subtle swell of her stomach.

“I’m really enjoying eating things and not throwing up afterwards,” she muttered.

He kissed her hair.

“Bed?” he suggested, when she put the plate on the floor.

She leaned more heavily against him, and he realized she was falling asleep.

“Your tailbone’s gonna hate you if you sleep here.”

She made a grumpy noise, yawned, and started to struggle to her feet. She’d gotten a little wobbly lately. He stood and offered her both hands, pulling her to her feet.

“Beh,” she started to say, yawning. “Beh… _augh_.” She covered her mouth.

“Bed?” he suggested again, mouth twitching.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’d like to see you stay awake when you’re growing a new person.”

“That’s why I’m suggesting bed,” he pointed out.

“Are you just trying to get me in bed, Garcia?”

“I am absolutely trying to get you in bed.” He rested one hand at the small of her back as she went ahead of him. He leaned towards her ear and turned his voice low and gravelly, in the way he knew did things to her: “Come get between the sheets with me, Lucy. We can sleep for _hours_.”

Her laugh turned into another yawn. “You know just what to say to me,” she managed to get out as she crawled under the covers.

“Mmm.” He joined her, and she scooted back against him. That moment of getting settled against each other, nestling into the pillows and getting the sheets just right— that would never get old.

“Good night,” he whispered.

She muttered something totally incoherent. He smiled, and closed his eyes.

#

Lucy closed the laptop. Being so far away from Ethan was honestly the one thing she truly regretted about moving down here. Lately, every time they Skyped, he seemed so much older. But talking at least once a week allowed her to tell that his mind was as sharp as ever, tired though he was.

Once the baby was born, the three of them would go see him. Lucy hadn’t yet worked out the least painful way to travel with a newborn, but she’d figure something out. Traveling while seven months pregnant had been bad enough, and she was glad _that_ was over. But she’d figured she’d owed it to her younger self, to accept the invitation to be on the plenary session panel of the conference that had been A Big Deal to her when she’d been just a young grad student.

She stood and stretched awkwardly. Her legs were stiff, even though she’d needed two breaks to accommodate this child’s fondness for sitting on her damned bladder. The fact that San Diego was having a rare rainstorm, and the water pouring down outside, probably hadn’t helped.

She walked slowly and majestically to the kitchen— she absolutely refused to use the word _waddle_ — and started chopping vegetables for dinner. It was a little awkward considering she couldn’t stand as close to the counter as she was used to doing, but she suspected that would soon be the least of her problems.

She was no longer scared of giving birth. She knew it would hurt like hell. But it could be so much worse.

Her newfound perspective came from Denise, though not in any way related to Denise’s own experience. When she’d called two weeks ago, it had been for Garcia, not Lucy. And she hadn’t had any time for social chatting.

Lucy had watched Garcia’s expression, and she’d taken the phone from him when he’d been about to hang up. “What’s going on?” she’d demanded, when Garcia went into the other room for— what, she didn’t know.

“There’s a hostage situation in El Cajon,” Denise had said. “I need someone who can handle himself in a firefight and who speaks Croatian. There’s no one closer. _Or_ more competent.”

Lucy had closed her eyes. “Is this how it’s going to be the rest of our lives?” she asked. “He’s always on call for matters of _national security_ , because otherwise he could go—”

She knew that was unfair. Not once, before now, had Denise asked anything like this of him. But Lucy was angry and frightened, and she’d thought Garcia had come home from the war.

“I’m not asking him because of national security, Lucy. I’m asking him because there are three children in that house who deserve to survive the night.”

Lucy had swallowed.

She’d gone with Garcia as far as the DHS perimeter, and then she’d had to wait with the locals and the media. A sympathetic restaurant owner, who’d been forced to shut down for the duration, lent her a building key so she could go pee at short and regular intervals. Lucy was very grateful, but she thought it would be a long time before she stopped associating the smell of tortillas fried in oil with fear and adrenaline.

The night was cold; after a while, one of the agents, apparently knowing she was there with Garcia, let her wait in a heated car. They heard no shots, no shouts, nothing. DHS’s being accommodating didn’t extend to telling her what was going on.

It was hours later when she finally saw movement. She scrambled out of the car and craned her neck, trying to see over the agents on the other side of the tape. Only Garcia’s height let her pick him out of the crowd of men. He was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest, and carrying a kid.

Lucy had sagged in relief.

He’d seen her watching, and come over at the first opportunity, ignoring the agents still talking to him. He ducked under the tape. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

“I’m fine. Are _you_ all right?”

He nodded once. “No shots,” he said softly. “No casualties among the hostages.”

“Mr. Flynn,” a disgruntled voice said behind him.

“It’s going to be a while,” he continued, completely ignoring whoever that was. “For the debriefing. Can you get a ride home?”

She searched his expression. “It’s over?”

“It’s over.”

“Mr. _Flynn_.”

She nodded. “All right. I’ll, um. I’ll see.”

“I’ll see you at home,” he told her. He reached for her, and brushed his hand across her cheek.

“ _Mr. Flynn_ —”

“All right, all right, keep your damn pants on,” Garcia had said as he turned. Lucy had smiled for the first time since Denise’s call.

Those silent hours of waiting had been like a booster vaccine, reminding her of all she’d once endured on a regular basis. After that, she thought she could handle just about anything.

She glanced down and discovered she’d diced all the peppers into very small pieces.

She heard Garcia come home not too long after that. Today had been his weekly security audit of MaSun Industries. “Hello,” she called.

“Hello.”

He’d clearly gotten soaked. How could he be so smart and yet forget umbrellas existed?

He stood in the kitchen rather then getting out of his coat. He cleared his throat. “Uh, Lucy.”

“Hi.” She smiled at him. “How are you?”

He took a damp rag out of his pocket. He looked a little sheepish. “I found her under the car.”

_What?_

The grey bundle stirred, turning into a very scrawny and damp kitten. She yawned, showing off very sharp white canines, and made a barely audible _mew_.

“I thought,” he added, “we could call her Prospero.”

Lucy stared at him helplessly. It had been on the tip of her tongue to say, _let’s dry her off and feed her some tuna, and she can go to the shelter in the morning_. But— Garcia wanted to _keep_ her?

“And I thought— ah, there’s that parasite, so a covered litterbox— I thought the spare bedroom would be the best place, at least until the baby’s born, because you don’t go in there very much—” The words tumbled out of him. “Unless you mind?” He sounded like he couldn’t imagine why she might.

It wasn’t that she actively _disliked_ cats. She’d just— never—

But was Lucy going to say no to him? She sure as hell was not.

She cleared her throat. “Prospero?” she said. “Like The Tempest?”

Garcia nodded.

And just like that, they, apparently, had a kitten.

Garcia began to dry her more thoroughly than he’d been able to do in the car, and cracked open a can of tuna. Lucy put the vegetables in the fridge and went out to the nearest pet store for an emergency supply of… everything.

She got home after running a gauntlet of well-meaning people who looked at her cart, looked at her stomach, and started to explain to her in detail about toxoplasmosis. Which, thanks for that, but she’d already checked with her midwife just to be safe.

Lucy had to admit, the kitten was more prepossessing now that she was dry and fluffy. Well, Lucy wasn’t at her best frightened and soaking wet, either.

“The vet up the street is open late, so I called and got an appointment for tomorrow,” Garcia said, once he’d unloaded the last of the cat groceries.

“How’d you manage that?”

“Charm.”

Lucy snorted.

After supper, Garcia took up residence in the armchair in the spare bedroom, keeping an eye on the kitten to make sure she understood where to poop. Lucy walked by half an hour later and found him with his head back, eyes closed, book facedown in his lap, a small grey bundle of fluff curled up between his ear and his shoulder.

She couldn’t help it. She took a picture. And sent it to the team. _So, this happened_. _Her name is Prospero_.

 _I did not expect that one of the most adorable things I’d ever see would involve Flynn_ , Jiya wrote back.

 _you know about toxo right_ , Wyatt replied.

 _Connor approves of the name_ , Rufus said after a few minutes, apparently working late tonight.

Garcia shut Prospero in the spare bedroom for the night, with her food, water, litter box, and a small cardboard box lined with soft rags. Later, Lucy half-woke, unsure of what time it was or what had disturbed her, until she felt something tugging at the sheets and sharp little claws travel across her ankle. Prospero trotted all the way up the bed, curled up right by Garcia’s head, and began to purr smugly.

Garcia’s lips twitched.

Lucy sat up. “She’s not sleeping between us,” she said. “I draw the line at a fur ball with pointy bits keeping us from cuddling.”

“Agreed,” Garcia said.

Prospero looked at Lucy with wide amber eyes, sat up again, and padded onto her pillow. Okay, that was a little sw—

Holding eye contact until the last possible moment, the kitten started to noisily lick her butt.

Garcia reached out and scooped her up in one big hand. “Okay, that’s enough of that.” With his other hand, he tugged off Lucy’s pillowcase and tossed it into the dirty laundry. Lucy was pretty sure the butt hadn’t actually, you know, touched fabric, but she wasn’t going to _stop_ him.

“How’d she even get out?” Lucy added.

“I’ll find out.” Garcia smiled a little helplessly down at his new pet.

Prospero. An enchanter. Garcia had named her well.

#

“We don’t have to do this,” she’d told him. “You look exhausted.”

“I’m fine, Jess. And she’s looking forward to it.”

 _Uh-huh_ , Jessica thought now, watching Wyatt snore softly on the blanket.

Could be worse, though. Could be a _lot_ worse. Sometimes Wyatt— her Wyatt— had come home from overseas trips not able to sleep at all, spending his nights staring holes in the wall. For him to fall asleep in public like this, in the middle of a park? That was a good sign.

Jess quietly put the leftover food back in the cooler. Grocery store delis made the whole picnic thing about a thousand times easier. Which was good, because Grace had had her heart set on it. She’d been _inconsolable_ when Wyatt left, and to try to comfort her one night, Jessica had suggested doing something special to welcome Wyatt home. That hadn’t made a noticeable dent in the crying, so Jessica hadn’t thought Grace had even noticed. But the next day Grace had been chattering all about the picnic they were going to take Daddy on when he got home. Well, whatever made her focus on his coming back instead of his being gone, right?

Grace herself was playing industriously nearby, seeing things in a few shrubs and some other landscaping that only a toddler could. Occasionally she’d stop to record something in her ‘sketchbook,’ a little spiral bound notebook that Jess’d tied a pencil to, filled with scribbles. Every so often, she ran back to the blanket to carefully lay some find or other on Wyatt’s stomach. Jessica very quietly took a picture of the growing collection.

Wyatt snuffled and opened his eyes. “‘m I covered in sticks?” he muttered.

Jessica snickered. “She missed you.”

“Great.” But Wyatt carefully gathered them into a pile before he sat up, blinking sleepily.

“I maybe missed you a little too,” Jess said, toying with one of the twigs. “You know, mostly at bath time.”

Wyatt snorted. “She doesn’t smell like a donkey’s pits, so you must’ve managed somehow.” He dug around in the cooler for a drink. “It’s nice to have real food again.”

“Yeah?”

Wyatt glanced sideways. “Figured I should probably get my fill, you know, before they send me out again.”

“Mmm.”

He’d startled the hell out of her, last night, by telling her he was thinking of getting out. She was pretty sure it had something to do with Grace, and she wasn’t sure where that was gonna go. But today— they could just enjoy the fresh air, and the sunshine, and their kid running around playing blissfully in the dirt.

“You wanna grab tacos tonight or something?” he added.

“I could go out and pick something up.”

He made a non-committal noise. “Thought maybe we could walk down to the taqueria after she’s asleep. Get Mrs. Ellison to watch her.”

She looked sideways at him.

Hmm. Tacos, beer, adult conversation? Jessica loved Grace dearly, but she’d _desperately_ missed talking to other grownups. Her only real chances had been the few shifts she still took each week, and dinners with Lucy and Flynn.

“I’m up for that,” she said after a minute.

Wyatt smiled at her.

Grace came running back. “Draw,” she ordered, holding out her notebook to him.

“Draw, huh? Whatcha want me to draw?” Wyatt flipped through her notebook slowly, studying the pages of random lines seriously. “Okay, I know. But you gotta stay still.”

“Still,” Grace agreed. She plopped down on the blanket.

Grace was about as still as a golden retriever puppy on pixie sticks, but Jessica watched as her face took shape, anyway, under Wyatt’s pencil. “Holy shit,” she said softly. She’d had no idea Wyatt could draw like that.

“What shit?”

Oh, fuck, she _really_ had to stop doing that.

“It’s a boring—” Wyatt noticed Jessica shaking her head at him, and frowned at her. _What?_ he mouthed.

Jessica would give him the story over tacos, how one of the neighbors had been telling them about a disappointingly boring movie he’d seen, and Grace’d decided to show off her vocabulary of boring words.

Wyatt gave Jessica a dirty look, which she probably deserved, and said, “Hold still, honey, so I can draw you.”

Jessica got up to use the bathroom. When she got out, Wyatt had finished his drawing, which Jessica would suggest they freaking _frame_ or something, and Grace was playing in the—

She wailed, suddenly, and ran back to Wyatt. Wyatt pulled her into his lap, frowning down at her hand. Jessica couldn’t see any blood, but she hurried—

“Oh, c’mon, grow up, kid,” some guy walking by said. “Don’t be a little wussy.”

Wyatt looked up, and she was kind of surprised his stare didn’t kill the guy on the spot.

The idiot took that as provocation to stop. “It’s just a scratch, right? Pain’s good for ‘em, toughens ‘em up.”

Wyatt cradled Grace as she whimpered. Jessica could pretty much see the rage rolling off of him.

“Get out,” he said quietly.

The guy looked suddenly unnerved. He tried for a brave sneer, failed miserably, and kind of scurried off.

Jess’s eyebrows went up despite herself. She knew this Wyatt wasn’t the Wyatt she remembered, but if she’d needed proof…

She reached the blanket as Wyatt let his breath out in a slow exhale, then turned to Grace again. “Sorry about him, honey,” he said. “Lemme have another look at your hand.”

Grace’s little palm had a gash across it from a stick or something. It didn’t look too bad, but from Grace’s sniffles, it felt pretty bad.

“C’mon, baby,” Jess said. “We’ll wash you up in the bathroom, okay?” She picked Grace up, who was getting _heavy_.

Grace howled at the sting of the soap, but her whimpers had trailed off by the time they reached the blanket. About sixty seconds after Wyatt had bandaged her palm and dried her eyes, she was smiling again, poking at something in the dirt with her other hand.

“You gonna be all right?” Jessica asked him quietly.

He exhaled and nodded. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Finally he just said, “Yeah.” He made a face. “I wanted to beat the you-know-what out of him,” he admitted.

“So did I.” She glanced in the direction the idiot had gone. “Too bad I can’t somehow trick him into being the demonstration target for my next class.”

Wyatt snorted, clearly enjoying that mental image. “We really gotta stop swearing in front of her,” he said after a minute.

“And by ‘we’ you mean ‘me?’”

“I mean… You did pretty much teach her all the bad words she knows.”

“Except for bastard. You and Dave taught her that one.” Jess was gonna stand on principle here, damn it.

“Ooh, yeah,” Wyatt said. “She’d really get thrown out of class for that one.”

“ _Fine_ , I’ll watch my mouth.”

Wyatt smirked at her. God, that smirk should be illegal.

“She did learn other things while you were gone,” Jessica said with dignity. “Ask her to show you her shape sorter when we get home.”

Wyatt nodded. “She’s growing up fast.” He sounded wistful.

They were coming due for a couple of conversations, it sounded like. His future plans, and maybe their future plans. They’d have a lot to start talking about over tacos. Though with their luck one or both of them would be asleep on their feet by then.

Grace came running back. “Rock,” she said proudly. “Rock for Mommy, rock for Daddy.” She tucked a pebble into each of their hands, then ran off again.

“Well, the park’s a big hit,” Wyatt said after a minute.

“Think we should get her home before she crashes?”

“Yeah, probably.”

They packed up and headed home. Jessica drove, and because she was a terrible person, left it to Wyatt to explain why Grace shouldn’t use “shit” as a rhyme in her little songs. Hey, he’d missed her, right?

Grace fell asleep in the car; Wyatt carried her upstairs and tucked her into bed. “She’s gonna need a bigger bed one of these days,” he said quietly, coming out of his room and shutting the door behind him.

Yeah, they had some talking to do over their taco summit. But… all three of them were alive, and well, and free, and together.

Whatever the future held, Jessica wasn’t scared.

#

“Well,” Jiya said. “This time we only had _one_ mention of my mom’s friends’ grandkids, followed by tears.” She closed the laptop. “You know the really sad part?”

“That’s genuine progress?” Rufus said, reaching behind her for a specialty screwdriver.

“Exactly.” She pulled her scrunchie out and put her hair up again. “I’ve _tried_ ,” she added. “You know the last time we were at Lucy and Flynn’s? And Grace was in adorable toddler mode?”

“Yeah?”

“I kept thinking, like, maternal instincts, engage! Rufus, _I just don’t have any_.”

“That’s… fine,” he said. “I mean, as long as it’s fine with you.”

“It’s fine with _me_ ,” she said darkly. She looked at him. “Is your mom gonna hassle us, too?”

“No.”

He said it with such finality, she looked at him.

He put down the screwdriver. “We didn’t have an easy time growing up, Jiya,” he added softly. “She’s the last person in the world who’d ever tell someone to have kids they’re not ready for.”

She looked at him, and stood, and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing the beautiful warm brown skin of his forehead. Then, very gently, each eyelid. Then the tip of his nose. Then, lingeringly, his mouth. He slid his arms around her and sighed softly, twining his fingers through her hair.

“I love you,” she told him.

“I know.”

“You look like Han Solo when you smile like that.”

His smile immediately turned a lot less _cocky_ and _confident_ and a lot more _young_ and _delighted_. “Really?”

She kissed him again. “Is it weird that you had to get stuck in 1754 for us to get our shit together?”

“Oh, come on, I would’ve gotten up the courage to ask you out again… eventually…”

She looked at him.

“… maybe…” He ducked his head. “I love you, too,” he murmured against her mouth.

After a minute, he reached out and touched something on the table. “Is that your speaker paperwork for Grace Hopper?”

She nodded, totally knowing her own smile mirrored his from just a moment ago. “Somewhere, my younger self is losing it over this.”

They sat down again, he tinkering with Roomba guts, she filling out the paperwork. She absentmindedly almost put down her address as Oakland, and put the pen down, thinking.

He noticed. “What is it?”

“Last weekend, when we went to visit your mom and brother, and you and Kevin went to the game? I went to Chinatown.”

She hadn’t been back before. She’d told herself it was because everything had been destroyed in the earthquake anyway, and it was totally different now. Which was true. But not the only reason.

He put down the screwdriver, watching her.

“When I first got back,” she said slowly, remembering those awful days in Florida. “Everything about modern life was _so weird_. I kept thinking, you guys don’t know how good you have it. But now… this is normal again. And it’s _crazy_ to think that I lived for three years in the 1880s.” She looked up at him.

“You ever think… we’re letting our past selves down by moving on?” she asked finally.

He shook his head. “No.” After a minute, he said, “Were we happy? There in the bunker?”

“I mean… I was happy to be with you.” Most of the time. Some of the time. The visions of his impending death had been, you know. Awful.

“Did you _want_ to be happy?”

“Of course.”

“And are you happier now?”

“Absolutely.”

He leaned forward and kissed her with devastating gentleness. “Then that’s your answer,” he whispered.

It was a while before they stopped kissing.

“I mean, Wyatt and Flynn, they’re soldiers, they’re used to… you know,” he added. “Maybe it’s different for them. But for me? We saved the world, and now we get to live again. I can’t think of a better ending.” He reached out and smoothed her hair back. “I know… it’s different for you, though. I mean, I didn’t live there for three years. Do _you_ feel like you’re letting your past self down?”

She thought about it. “In Florida,” she said finally. “I couldn’t see past how awful it was then. I couldn’t see a way out. I think… my past self would be horrified if that never changed.”

“So maybe _not_ moving on would be letting our past selves down.”

She considered this. “Yeah, maybe.”

Her past self… no. Her past self might not understand all the choices she was making now. But her past self would absolutely be happy for her.

Then she considered _him_ , her brilliant, brave husband who’d been through so much even _before_ he started time traveling, who could be incredibly tough but still had the courage to be soft.

“You’re a damned miracle,” she told him quietly.

He didn’t reply, or even react. She frowned. After a minute, he said, “I wish you’d stop letting these onion-chopping ninjas into our apartment when I’m trying to work.” His voice was a little choked.

She laughed. “Ninjas?”

“Yes. Absolutely. Ninjas. That’s definitely the only reason why I’m tearing up right now.”

She rested her chin on her hand and looked at him. “Really?”

He put the screwdriver down. “No.” He wiped his eyes, and reached for her. “C’mere.”

#

It was really reassuring to know they hadn’t already ruined their child’s life by naming her something awful.

Lying in the birthing center against Garcia, with their baby, just a few minutes old, in her arms, Lucy had been horribly afraid of that— because, giddy with pain and exhaustion and incredible joy, she’d just been out of _words_ , and he hadn’t been much better. Kind of unfortunate when you had to pick a name. She’d frankly suspected he would’ve agreed if she’d suggested Rutabaga.

Maybe not. He had, after all, flatly vetoed Maria as a first name, saying, “Give her her own name.” And Lucy, holding her for the first time, had known instinctively that Amy wasn’t right, either— but if she’d suggested it, he, who knew what it was like to grow up under the shadow of someone who was gone, might’ve objected to that too.

On the other hand, he had suggested Paul as a middle name. So maybe her concerns hadn’t been unwarranted.

“Alice Maria Flynn-Preston,” Mother Robyn began, holding Alice carefully as the six-week-old stared in wonder at her rainbow vestments. “I baptize you in the name of the Father—” _Splash!_ — “And of the Son—” _Splash!_ — “And of the Holy Spirit.” _Splash!_

Alice, understandably, wailed, and never really stopped after that. But this was a short, lightly-attended service, which was exactly why Lucy had chosen it for the christening.

She looked around at their assembled family, and nearly teared up. God, how had she gone from feeling like she’d lost everything, in those early days in the bunker, to _this?_

She’d gone into labor three weeks early at a faculty meeting, and the colleague who’d driven her to the birthing center had driven off again with Lucy’s hospital bag in the back seat. Wyatt had tracked her down and brought the bag so Garcia didn’t have to. He’d also, Lucy suspected, held about a two-minute intervention with Garcia, though Garcia hadn’t said anything before, after, or since, and she hadn’t asked. But when he’d come back with the bag, that pinched look had been gone from between his eyebrows, and he’d been unshakeable and reassuring through that whole awful labor.

Jiya had made a habit of showing up in those first weeks with large bags of simple groceries, or takeout, enough to feed them for a few days at a time. After two years of eating dinner together nearly every week, she knew their favorites. Not having to think about food when they were out of brain cells, knowing there would just be something _there_ and ready to eat, had been a godsend.

That first week, Rufus had patiently talked Lucy down one night for nearly an hour, when she’d shut herself in the laundry room, crying over— over parenting, and Rittenhouse, and parenting with Rittenhouse in her blood. After that, he’d made a habit of texting her once or twice a day— sometimes to see if she needed anything, but usually just to check on her spirits. Lucy had _way_ underestimated the postpartum hormonal mood swings until they happened, and he’d helped so much. She owed him about a thousand hugs.

Denise had patiently answered all the questions Garcia couldn’t help with, continuing to answer her phone even after Lucy called in tears at four in the morning because it hurt so badly to pee and no one had warned her about _that_. Lucy hadn’t realized how much she would want the perspective of someone who’d survived it all, until she’d actually given birth herself.

Connor, who Lucy hadn’t really expected to come tonight. He’d given them a state-of-the-art baby monitor that he must’ve custom-built. Lucy had been merely appreciative and thankful until she’d seen the look on Garcia’s face, and considered what it meant to _him_.

Gabriel— they’d planned the christening for when he’d be in the States on business. Garcia, or even she, could Skype him at some ungodly hour their time, and he’d almost always pick up, totally unbothered by their pajamas or near-nudity, or the fact that they could barely string two words together but desperately needed someone to tell them that one day their baby would sleep. He didn’t know anything about raising kids, but he was incredibly comforting anyway.

And Jessica, holding Grace and hanging back, looking like she felt a little out of place. Lucy had opened the door one afternoon, with Alice strapped to her chest, to find Jessica standing in front of a couple of boxes. “I brought you some diapers,” she’d announced.

“Oh. Uh, thank you.”

Jessica had nodded and started to turn, as if she was actually going to leave.

“Do you— want to come in?” Lucy had offered.

They’d stood in the living room a little awkwardly. “Look, let me fix us both some tea,” Jessica had said, and they’d ended up talking for an hour.

New arrivals at the back of the church caught her eye just as the service broke up— Tom and Judith! Lucy hadn’t been expecting them. She left Garcia watching Gabriel chirp at his niece and went to greet them, noticing that Judith had her arm tucked through Tom’s. Nineteenth century manners, or a far more interesting development?

“Sorry we’re late,” Tom told her. “Got caught in traffic.”

“I had no idea you were even coming, I thought you were both up in the Bay Area.” Lucy hugged them both, looked from one happy face to the other, and drew her own conclusions. “It’s so good to see you. Are you coming back to the house?”

It was crowded, but they managed to find seats for everyone, bringing chairs from the kitchen and moving the small mountains of laundry into the library. The one thing she and Garcia had managed to do to get the house ready for company was clean the hall bath toilet. Right now, that was their standard. Lucy was _very_ proud they’d met it.

Wyatt gave Garcia a hand with the food while Lucy Skyped Ethan, as promised, to show him Alice in her christening outfit. Ethan was delighted.

“Look who it is, Will,” he said to someone out of frame. Lucy’s eyes narrowed. Sixty-plus years in Rittenhouse had made her grandfather devious, and he’d _known_ approximately when she would call.

Will leaned into frame, and then his rather plastic smile turned into an actual one. “Oh my God, your baby.”

“Yep,” Lucy said.

“She looks— she looks, uh…”

“It’s okay, Will,” she told her half-brother. “You can say she looks like a weird pink raisin.”

Will laughed. “She has a cute tiny face,” he said, which was a pretty graceful compliment for a seventeen-year-old boy. “Are you, um… I guess you’ll probably stay down there for a while, right?”

“Actually we’re planning a trip up there so she and Ethan can meet. As soon as she’s… as soon as she can travel.” Alice had been born nearly a month early. So far, the only consequence they were aware of was that she was small. But Lucy and Garcia both knew fragility might manifest itself in other ways.

“She looks adorable, Lucy.” Ethan’s eyes were wet. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

Lucy narrowly escaped blubbering in her baby’s hair, but Wyatt said that was surprisingly common.

“Oh,” she added. “This came earlier in the week.” She held up the advance reader copy of _Labor in the Labor Movement_ … which, considering Alice’s early arrival, Lucy had still been finishing the proofs for while _in_ labor.

“Congratulations,” Ethan said. “I look forward to reading it.”

Grace intercepted Lucy as she re-entered the living room, and looked up at her expectantly.

“Hi,” Lucy said, when Grace didn’t move.

“Lucy’s busy right now, sweetie,” Jessica said. “Why don’t you show her later?”

Lucy squatted to be at roughly Grace’s eye level. “You have something to show me?”

Grace nodded.

“She’s been really excited about this,” Jessica explained. “Ever since you gave her those flashcards.”

Lucy couldn’t remember which flashcards off the top of her head, but she was forgetting a lot of things these days. “What do you have to show me?” she prompted.

Grace opened her mouth. “Washton Ams Jeffson Madson Moron.”

“Oh, wow,” Lucy said. “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe? That’s _pretty_ impressive.”

Grace beamed. Wyatt, engrossed in conversation with Rufus about energy geopolitics or something, gave Lucy a pointed sideways look. Hey, it was years too late for him to kick Lucy out of the hospital room.

Jessica held out a full plate, and Denise took Alice so Lucy could eat. Lucy kept an eagle eye on Alice as she moved from Denise to Gabriel, and frankly basked in the laughter and happiness in the room. _And_ in the sensation of using _two hands_ to eat.

Wyatt sat down beside her, made a wry face, and snorted.

“What?” Lucy asked.

“Just thinking about how many people here have shot at someone else in this room.”

Jessica, holding Grace on his other side, looked at him in disbelief. “Seriously? This seems like the time?”

But Lucy didn’t mind. They’d fought, yes, many of them on opposite sides.

But that they were all here anyway was just another kind of victory—

Gabriel swore, and nearly dropped his plate. Lucy had about a second to wonder what was on his pants before Prospero finished her climb and perched in triumph on his knee, waiting expectantly to be fed.

“I thought you shut her in the bedroom,” Lucy said to Garcia.

“I did. She’s an escape artist.” He looked around, saw that Alice was safe with Rufus, and picked up his cat to keep her from making any more trouble.

Rufus honestly looked a little overwhelmed, and not in the _I didn’t realize I wanted one of these until now_ sense. More like the _help_ sense. But Judith, who’d helped raise seven younger siblings, was right on his other side. He’d be fine.

They had a cake, too— Lucy honestly had no idea where that had even come from— and then the house began to empty. Lucy was a little sad about that, because, despite their love and care, it felt like she never _saw_ them any more. On the other hand, she was exhausted, and Denise had reminded her, repeatedly, that this feeling of being overwhelmed would pass. When it did, their family would still be there

Gabriel was taking Garcia out for breakfast in the morning before he had to fly back east, and Denise had promised them dinner tomorrow night, company optional depending on how tired they were. Lucy hadn’t managed to ask Tom and Judith about their plans, but she could text them. Assuming she remembered and could track down her phone.

Gabriel, bless him, consolidated all the leftovers into a few containers and took out the trash before he left. That left Garcia and Lucy to sit on the floor with Alice, lean against each other, and stare tiredly at the small pile of presents that had appeared just like the cake.

“We could leave these for tomorrow,” Lucy muttered.

“And let Prospero get into them first?”

“Oh, _God_.”

So Lucy nursed Alice while Garcia start to unwrap.

“You know those old fairy tales?” she said suddenly.

He stopped, and looked up. “Which ones?”

“Christenings. About… gifts, given for good— or ill…” After a minute, she shook her head.

“There won’t be any of that latter category here,” Garcia said quietly, with an assurance that spoke volumes, coming from him.

Lucy smiled at their daughter, and at him. “I know.”

From Gabriel, there was a beautifully stitched and _durable_ looking stuffed parakeet; from Judith, a vibrant blanket. From Tom and Pete, a sturdy little wooden bison teether. From Denise, a gift certificate to a nearby grocery store, which Lucy didn’t truly appreciate until Garcia read her the note: _they deliver_.

From Jessica, an empty photo album and a gift certificate to a print service. _So you can remember the early days_ was what _her_ note said. Lucy swallowed past a lump in her throat, and switched Alice to the other side.

From Jiya, a large bag of soft whale toys, whale onesies, tiny whale socks, a whale hat, and a whale board book.

“I take back what I just said about christenings,” Garcia sighed.

Lucy shrugged. “You did kind of start it.”

And from Rufus and Wyatt—

“Einstein for kids,” Garcia read, then pulled out the next book. “Churchill for kids. Curie for kids. I guess when she’s older— Lucy?”

Lucy laughed, and then cried, and then laughed and cried at the same time. She loved Rufus and Wyatt. She really, really loved them.

“Is seven thirty too early to go to bed?” she yawned, when she’d stopped laughing and crying, and Garcia had changed Alice’s diaper.

“When she’s gonna be up again two hours after we go to sleep? No.”

“Good point.”

It only took them forty-five minutes to actually go to bed, between checking the house, moving the cat, closing the blinds, having a snack, topping up Alice to maximize their possible sleep, and moving the cat.

“How is she getting _out?_ ” Lucy asked the second time. “I saw you shut her in there.”

“She figured out how to launch herself off the headboard and turn the lever with her body weight.”

 _Oh my God_. “… she got that from you,” Lucy muttered.

She got in bed, already half-asleep. “Garcia?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me she’ll sleep through the night.”

“She’ll sleep through the night.”

“And this will get better.”

“This will get better.”

Lucy curled up facing him and burrowed under the covers. “I guess it is pretty good already,” she whispered, and promptly fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A “few” notes (and **no finale spoilers in the comments, please** ):
> 
> Title from Tony Bennett’s “The Best Is Yet To Come.”
> 
> [Here's](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/7) a real world update on solar cell frontiers, on which I partially based MaSun’s work. And I think credit for the idea of Jiya and Rufus working on renewable energy is owed to OldShrewsburyian.
> 
> Imagine my delight when I discovered St. Lucy’s Day not only is celebrated in Croatia, but particularly in the part in which I’d already set Flynn’s childhood.
> 
>  _Peka_ refers to a particular cooking style; it’s not specific to seafood.
> 
> On Flynn’s backstory:
> 
> His biography, as shown in 1.01, is kind of hard to reckon with. There’s the obvious fact that he joined the Croatian Army in 1990, when he was 15 and it didn’t exist yet. But also, why, after two years, when Croatia was still fighting for independence, did he go fight for Bosnia and Herzegovina? Considering BiH and Croatia were briefly at war, what were the experiences of a seventeen-year-old Croat fighting for BiH? Why did he then leave in 1994, at the age of nineteen, when BiH and Croatia were still at war, to go fight in Chechnya?
> 
> I haven’t gone into details of how he went free at the end of chapter 11. Partially because it’s irrelevant, partially because Flynn’s canonical encounters with the justice system don’t make much sense. Agent Christopher says he’ll be tried in a “private military court,” which only makes sense if he were in the military. It’s more likely, because he’s considered a terrorist, that she means a military commission. However, currently the US only subjects non-citizens to military commissions on terrorism charges. For Flynn not to be a citizen, either he or his mother, who both worked in national defense, would have had to renounce their citizenship, which doesn’t make sense. (On the third hand, it doesn’t make much sense for Maria Thompkins to have ended up in Yugoslavia while working as a defense contractor, so……..)
> 
> All things being considered, Agent Christopher most likely means a military commission. However, if that’s the case, how does Flynn end up in a civilian prison? I say this not to be a stickler for the details, but to illustrate why I haven't given any more.
> 
> Finally, Maria Flynn. I realize this may seem like I’ve fridged her. However, her storyline actually reflects what I think is canonical evidence for her dying when Flynn is fairly young. It’s the way Flynn tells her, “Every memory I have of you, you were always sad.” That’s not a phrasing you use when you have very many memories of a person at all. Thus, if she died when Flynn was young, she herself would have been fairly young, which needs explanation.
> 
> Rear Admiral Hopper was a remarkable and formidable woman. I recommend reading about her sometime.
> 
> [This comic](http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/090308.html) was my introduction to Voyage Home. But while it’s easy to mock, I actually really appreciate the idea of the crew of the Enterprise running around trying to save humpback whales. Jiya’s opinions are not necessarily my own.
> 
> The only part of the Stanford and UCSD history departments that are based in reality are that they… exist.
> 
> “X is like putting the Hulk in charge of making sure things don’t get smashed” is a quote from DC Simpson.
> 
> The idea for a kid as a collaboration is a nod to Dorothy Sayers and “The Haunted Policeman.”
> 
> This fic does not endorse librarian stereotypes, so we’re clear.
> 
> Opinions differ on the wisdom of adopting a stray kitten while pregnant as long as the cat is clean and someone else cleans the litterbox regularly. The CDC straight-up says no. It’s always interesting balancing “ideal” behavior with what the characters would actually know.
> 
> Wyatt’s absences are shorter than a traditional deployment. What we find out about his career track in Timeless is kind of unconventional anyway, and Agent Christopher is still exercising an option on keeping him Stateside most of the time.
> 
> The US has a long history of problematizing and oppressing the reproduction of people of color. So I want to acknowledge that and be clear about why I went with a storyline where the two couples of white people have biological kids and the couple who are both people of color don’t. I really, really did not want to portray having children as the choice that’s right for everyone; Wyatt and Jessica had a child, and Flynn and Lucy were both canonically interested in kids, while Jiya and Rufus never mentioned it in canon that I recall. Therefore, it made sense to me that they might decide they just don’t want that.
> 
> Finally, I’ve grappled with what to do about the Lucy who took the journal back to Garcia, snapping back into existence in 2022 or 2023.
> 
> I think I’ll leave that open to interpretation.


	14. Epilogue

He leaned against the front door, eyes closed, and just breathed. He didn't try to fight the sorrow washing over him.

When he checked his phone, discovered it had been the better part of an hour, and went back inside, the house was empty.

He felt the familiar sharp fear. He had been there the _whole time_ , how could—

Prospero's indignant crying led him to the open back door. He let himself through the screen door, keeping the cat inside where she belonged. Lucy had Alice in the sling and was grading papers on the patio. She frowned in concentration and scribbled something in the margins. The breeze ruffled her hair and stirred the papers on the table, but she'd weighed everything down with rocks.

Love and worry and love and fear and love and guilt and love and the always-dumbstruck, overwhelmed, overwhelming feeling of  _how did I get so lucky_ all twisted together in his chest until he had to stop for a moment and just watch them.

Lucy looked up and saw him, and her gaze searched his face. "Are you going to be all right?"

He nodded once. "I'm s—"

She brandished her pen in a startlingly threatening manner. "Don't you dare."

He sank down in the chair beside her.

"Garcia, I'd be stunned if this weren't hard for you sometimes," Lucy added. "I know I don't understand how you feel, but I understand that you  _do_ ."

He closed his eyes. He at least owed her an explanation for why she'd found him weeping, earlier, and why he'd practically teleported outside when she'd taken Alice from him. It had been building for weeks, frankly, not helped by him getting even less sleep than Lucy, thanks to his damned dreams.

"She's her own person," he said slowly, "and I love her. But once in a while, she... reminds me so much of Iris."

After a minute, Lucy said, "It'd be surprising if she  _didn't_ remind you of her half-sister."

Half-sister. He swallowed past a fresh lump in his throat, and nodded.

Then he opened his eyes. "I hope I didn't disarrange your grading too much."

"Nope, managed just fine." She moved a stapled paper into the "done" pile, then put her pen down. "Garcia," she said softly. "Love."

He stared at her.

"I expected this," she told him. "Okay? Garcia, I  _know_ who you are. Even in the beginning when we had nothing else, we were honest with each other. I expected this. And I think you're incredibly brave." Suddenly, she was tearing up. "And I love you."

"Lucy," he breathed. He leaned forward awkwardly, careful not to wake Alice, and kissed Lucy's hair.

Not carefully enough. Alice let out a little whine.

"Is she hungry?"

"I just fed her about ten minutes ago."

"My turn, then."

When Garcia had Alice, Lucy gathered up her ungraded papers and shut herself in the office to work furiously on a conference panel proposal until Alice needed to be fed again. Her maternity leave had officially ended, but she still worked from home on the days like today that she didn't teach. He, meanwhile, still looked in on MaSun Industries once a week, but he'd quit working for Homeland Security without much regret.

And he still snatched odd moments to sketch out ideas for this anthology on the Nepalese Civil War. Speaking of which. After he'd changed Alice's diaper and settled her in the sling again, he carried her out to the living room, found one of his references, sat down on the couch, and promptly slumped back against the arm, the book closed in his lap.

Admittedly, until she was a little older, he wasn't likely to absorb much except through osmosis.

He hadn't been this deeply, viscerally  _exhausted_ since the last time he'd had a newborn at home. This might actually have been worse, with both of them watching their small and rather delicate daughter so carefully for any signs of distress.

But the fatigue notwithstanding, and moments like this morning, when the memories and the grief overwhelmed him, notwithstanding... he was blissfully happy.

Once Alice was bigger, once she was stronger, once she slept more, he and Lucy would both be— more settled. Better rested. But he wasn't sure he could imagine being  _happier_ .

Sometimes this did feel like lunacy, after the night Lorena and Iris had died. Sometimes, in the dark hours of the morning, it felt like betrayal. But whenever he pictured his and Lorena's positions reversed, it physically  _hurt_ to think of her spending the rest of her life alone with her ghosts, instead of... instead of finding love and family again.

Prospero curled up on the back of the couch, occasionally peeking one eye over her tail to make sure all was well. The warm weight of his baby lulled him, just like he suspected his heartbeat lulled her, and they all dozed together for a while. Finally she stirred, and cooed at him. He opened his eyes, smiled, and carefully took her out of the sling. He nuzzled the top of her head and raised her above his own head, chuckling when she babbled happily.

It took him two tries to get up; that old bullet wound was acting up, and his leg nearly seized up on him. He spread Judith's blanket out on the floor and put Alice on her stomach with a rattle and a crinkly fish within reach, then propped himself up on his side. He was exhausted, but even if it had been safe to do so, he wouldn't have been tempted to fall asleep. Not when he could watch his daughter start to push herself up and stare at the world around her with wide, fascinated eyes, big and dark like Lucy's. Watching her learn about things for the very first time, seeing her put pieces together of how the world  _worked_ ... awed him.

After a few minutes he helped her roll onto her back, and pulled her hanging gym over so she could swing at the bright dangling animals and gurgle happily whenever one of them rattled. That had been one of several presents from her great-grandfather, who was quite frankly in danger of spoiling her rotten.

Garcia felt for his phone and took a picture of Alice batting at a turquoise giraffe. Lucy sent Ethan pictures and updates nearly every day, which delighted him, and he would enjoy this one.

Someone knocked quietly on the front door.

Garcia scooped Alice up and looked out. He probably shouldn't have been surprised to see someone from Homeland Security. He'd read about a shootout in Las Vegas with all the hallmarks of a government coverup, and that kind of secrecy was suggestive. Las Vegas, huge cash flows; it made sense someone might come to him for help cracking something.

Which didn't explain why Denise Christopher was on their front porch holding a baby.

He opened the door. "We're not interested in a trade-in, we're very satisfied with our current model."

He glanced down. A couple months older than Alice, if he had to guess. Dark hair, dark, alert, eyes, warm light brown skin.

"How much would it surprise you to learn Rittenhouse was on the take from casinos?" Agent Christopher asked.

"Zero."

"We found one of their last known sleeper cells—"

"You've been finding these 'last cells' for two years."

"— dug into the Strip, using their stolen funds to stay very well-hidden." Agent Christopher took a more secure hold of the mystery baby. "Her parents were members. Her father decided to defect. Rittenhouse killed both parents. She was hidden in a drawer upstairs."

"Are they after her?" Reluctantly, Garcia stepped back to let them inside, trying not to think about old superstitions about crossing thresholds.

"I don't know. But she needs a place to go."

Something ruthlessly painful clenched around Garcia's heart. "You have  _no right_ to ask this of us." To bring the war back to their doorstep, literally. To ask them to risk—

"What I  _have_ is a seven month old baby who was just violently orphaned," said Agent Christopher. "She needs a foster family who knows about Rittenhouse. Who knows the dangers involved."

"What's her name?" Lucy asked from behind Garcia. He hadn't even heard her come out.

Agent Christopher stepped further into the living room. "Elena," she said.

Lucy carefully lifted Elena out of Agent Christopher's arms and smiled down at her.

"No agency would place a child here," Garcia pointed out. "I'm a violent felon."

"She's not in the system, Flynn. Her placement is on my say-so."

Garcia looked down helplessly at the child Lucy was holding. God, no. To bring this danger back into their house— they  _couldn't_ .

But if they didn't—

He felt a rushing sense of things getting out of his control.

"Her parents were Rittenhouse," Agent Christopher told Lucy.

"Like mine." Lucy looked up again. "How long do you mean when you say fostering?"

"It could be a while."

"Like,  _forever_ , 'a while?'" Garcia asked. "We're barely coping with one kid in the house."

"That's bullshit and we both know it," Agent Christopher said. "You've handled worse."

_Bullshit?_ Clearly it had been far too long since Agent Christopher's own children were infants. He closed his eyes, and ran his hand through his hair. Then he looked at Lucy. She held Elena out to him.

He spoke seven and a half languages. He still couldn't adequately describe just how much he hated Agent Christopher at the moment.

He did not want this. He wanted to leave the mopping-up of Rittenhouse to Homeland Security. He wanted to raise his child and not have to worry she'd be murdered before her sixth birthday. He didn't want to face fresh danger with Lucy, with  _Alice_ , beside him.

But he owed Agent Christopher a lot. And through owing her, he'd come to trust her.

He knew  _exactly_ why he was so angry.

He sighed. He and Lucy switched babies. He looked down at the child he was holding, at Elena, with a looming sense of the inevitable. Even if he hadn't owed Agent Christopher his freedom multiple times over...

"What about her relatives?" Lucy asked.

"None living."

So, even after Agent Christopher and Homeland Security finally found the  _actual_ last Rittenhouse cell... no one would come forward to claim her. And at that point...

At that point, unless this were about two weeks from now, she'd be settled here. And you didn't uproot a child like that without a damn good reason.

He and Lucy looked at each other for a long moment.

He looked down at Elena again.

He'd dared to think this was over for them. He  _wanted_ it to be over for them. Yet all his insistences that they'd earned an end to this wouldn't change the fact of this child who'd got caught up in the war. They could send her away and it wouldn't change the fact that she deserved peace even more than they did.

God, he was desperately out of practice at being a heartless bastard.

He gave Agent Christopher a baleful look, and turned back to Lucy.

"Could you excuse us a minute?" she told Agent Christopher.

"Of course."

Carrying an unexpected number of babies, they went into the next room. They looked at each other.

"We're going to do this, aren't we," she said after a minute, rocking Alice gently as she started to fuss.

"It looks that way," he muttered. "Are you okay with that?"

Lucy nodded. "This could've been me." She nodded to Elena. "She deserves— she deserves a life, Garcia."

"I know," he sighed.

"Are  _you_ okay with that?"

He bit back his instinctive response of  _hell no_ , and took a minute to collect his scattered thoughts.

_Scorched earth_ was a politely understated description of his early tactics against Rittenhouse. Though he'd learned how to target Rittenhouse with greater accuracy, his methods had not changed.

He looked down at Lucy, remembering the musty smell of that basement in 1954. Was it there that he'd first learned to respect her as a warrior equal to himself?

After a lifetime of fighting, he had been slow to learn that not all defiance was violence. But he had learned nevertheless.

This was  _crazy_ . But to refuse—

"This is a good thing," he said slowly, reluctantly. To shelter her, and quite likely— oh, God— raise her.

He knew taking Elena in made it more likely he'd have to fight Rittenhouse with bullets again. But the fight had come back to them  _today_ , and those were not now the weapons that were called for.

He swallowed. "Yes," he added. The words seemed to hang in the air as something ominous, with visions of July 18 th , 2014, clouding his mind's eye. 

"Yes," he said. "I'm okay with this."

They returned to the living room. Agent Christopher looked from one of them to the other. "Am I getting her things?"

"Yes," he sighed.

Agent Christopher went to the car for Elena's things, and for the initial paperwork, leaving the four of them in the living room. Garcia looked down at Elena, who was very quiet. An aftereffect of the gunfight? Or was she just naturally a quiet baby?

They'd find out.

He looked at Lucy, and couldn't help smiling ruefully.

"We'll handle this," she said, cradling Alice against her shoulder.

Suddenly adding a second infant to their household, with a high likelihood that she'd be there forever...

"I don't know  _how_ yet," Lucy admitted. "But we will."

"We've gotten through everything else," he muttered, honestly not sure which of them he was trying to reassure.

He looked down at Lucy, and remembered all the things they'd walked through together. "We've gotten through everything else," he repeated.

They'd get through this the same way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill: **no finale spoilers in the comments, please**.
> 
> I can’t believe I ever thought I’d fit this into one chapter.
> 
> I have a few outtakes posted under [the Only Way Out tag](https://sallyexactly.dreamwidth.org/tag/only+way+out) of my Dreamwidth, and I hope to add a few more, including the alternate Jessica back story.
> 
> Thanks especially to everyone who’s read along and commented as I posted. I know it’s a leap of faith to read something that’s not complete, especially from an author with incomplete longfic. This was a new fandom and my first time posting anything in years, so your feedback gave me some welcome confidence.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of a stylistic experiment for me. I tend to conceive of grand-scope narratives and then get bogged down in the execution, so for this story I'm playing with sprinkling lots of short scenes along the way to keep things moving. Is it gonna work? We'll find out together!
> 
> Many thanks to C for betaing this prologue... and for getting me into this show in the first place.
> 
> I know a bunch of folks at this point are writing their own takes on season 3. When I realized that was more or less what I was doing, I basically stopped reading any other Timeless fic, so any similarities with other fics are probably coincidental. However, this prologue was, I think, unconsciously influenced by deathmallow's Looper.
> 
> Finally, if you're here after reading some of my other work and wondering what on earth happened to that, I wrote a brief explanation here: https://archiveofourown.org/comments/179435340


End file.
